Boston College Founders Professor Mary Bilder has been elected to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). According to the AAS, members are “elected by their colleagues in recognition of scholarship, for support of cultural institutions, for manifest interest in bibliographical matters, or for distinction as community or national leaders in humanistic affairs.”
Current and past members of AAS have included scholars, educators, publishers, collectors, cultural administrators, civic leaders, journalists, writers, and filmmakers, as well as lay persons with an interest in the field of American history. Fourteen presidents of the United States have been members. AAS members have been awarded over sixty Pulitzer Prizes and over fifty Bancroft Prizes for their work. Members have been elected from every region of our nation and from thirty-three foreign countries. AAS was established in 1812 by Revolutionary War patriot and printer Isaiah Thomas.
Professor Bilder’s most recent book, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, was awarded the 2016 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the James C. Bradford Prize for Biography from the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, and was named a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.
At Boston College Law School, Professor Bilder teaches in the areas of property, trusts and estates, and American legal and constitutional history.
She received her BA with Honors (English) and the Dean’s Prize from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, her JD (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, and her AM (History) and PhD from Harvard University in the History of American Civilization/American Studies. She was a law clerk to the Hon. Francis Murnaghan, Jr., US Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Her recent work has focused on the history of the Constitution, James Madison and the Founders, the history of judicial review, and colonial and founding era constitutionalism. Professor Bilder is a member of the American Law Institute, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She is member of the Massachusetts Bar Association (inactive status) and the State Bar of Wisconsin (inactive status). She was given the Emil Slizewski Faculty Teaching Award in 2007 and was named Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar in 2009. She was named the Founders Professor of Law in 2016.
Professor Bilder is also the author of The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard University Press, 2004), awarded the Littleton-Griswold Award from the American Historical Association. Her articles appear in several important collected volumes of essays and a wide variety of journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, the George Washington Law Review, Law and History Review, Law Library Journal, and the Journal of Policy History. She co-edited Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
She has received a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Grant, the Boston College Annual Prize for Scholarship, a Boston College Distinguished Research Award, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and was a Boston College Law School Fund Scholar. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Law and History Review, and The Journal of Legal Education, the Board of The New England Quarterly, and is a member of the American Law Institute, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She was the Lucy G. Moses Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School in 2001 and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the spring of 2008.
Professor Bilder is the author of a renowned blog entry on how to teach the Rule Against Perpetuities in one class hour, has been interviewed by The Documentary Group and History Channel, and served as a legal history consultant to Steven Spielberg on Amistad.