Daniel J. Sharfstein, Dick and Martha Lansden Professor of Law By Grace Renshaw
Legal historian Daniel J. Sharfstein’s interest in the profound impact of racial inequality on the personal histories and economic prospects of ordinary Americans predates his study of law. Sharfstein, who was appointed to the Dick and Martha Lansden Chair in Law last summer, worked as a reporter covering education, policing and land use in Southern California before earning his law degree at Yale. His painstakingly researched books, written with a journalistic flair, illuminate broadscale aspects of American history, including slavery and its aftermath and the conquest of Native American lands, through the lives of individuals and families whose fates and livelihoods were shaped by laws and policies based on their race or tribal status. Sharfstein’s prize-winning first book, The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America, chronicles the lives of three Black families with members who assimilated into white communities, shedding an identity that subjected them to systemic discrimination. His second book, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War, examines a war the U.S. waged in the Northern Rockies during the summer and fall of 1877 against a group of Nez Perce families who refused to leave their ancestral land and move onto a reservation. While the general leading U.S. Army forces had been an architect of Reconstruction and championed civil rights for freed people, one of his foes, a young Nez Perce leader, emerged as a key voice of dissent in post-Reconstruction America.
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Professor Sharfstein’s work examines the complex legal history of race in America.
Sharfstein recently has started researching a new book on the legal struggles of garment workers in early 20th-century New York, exploring labor and immigration and how the everyday law of work shapes new American identities. He also is directing a team of students and fellows who are completing a mapping project that grew out of a university course, Historic Black Nashville, that he co-teaches with Vanderbilt historian Jane Landers. The team is documenting locations where slaves lived
and worked in Nashville before the Civil War, work Sharfstein believes is particularly urgent now because of the rapid pace of development in Nashville. “We’re joining with other Middle Tennessee historians working to document the area’s history, and we’re doing it at a moment where the whole country is rethinking how history is memorialized and what kind of monuments we erect and keep,” he said. The map Sharfstein’s team is producing shows how pervasive slavery was in Nashville and will provide a geographic index of individual experiences of bondage in the city. “Slavery in Nashville was a big business, and in many ways the city served the institution,” he said. “At the same time, it was a river port, and many people held as slaves worked alongside free people of color and had access to streams of information and ideas from Canada to the Caribbean. Lots of men and women living and working in Nashville were claimed by owners who lived elsewhere. Some slaves were able to work independently here, run their own businesses and even negotiate and buy freedom for themselves and their children. The contingencies of slavery in Nashville affected how Black Nashvillians defined and fought for their freedoms before, during and after the Civil War.” At the law school, Sharfstein teaches Property Law, American Legal History and Federal Indian Law.
Daniel Sharfstein is the inaugural holder of the Dick and Martha Lansden Chair in Law, which honors Dick L. Lansden Jr. ’34 (BA’33), a founding partner in the firm that became Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, and his wife, Martha S. Lansden (BA’33). Sharfstein co-directs the George Barrett Social Justice Program at the Law School and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of History. He began his career as a legal historian as a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University. 38
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