Alison LaCroix

Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She is also an Associate Member of the University of Chicago Department of History. She is a scholar of US legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal thought.

Professor LaCroix is currently completing a book on US constitutional discourse between 1815 and 1861, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. The book, titled The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, will be published by Yale University Press in 2024. Professor LaCroix is also the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010). In 2021, President Biden appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Professor LaCroix holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Yale University. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2006, having previously held the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at New York University School of Law. Following law school, she practiced in the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. 

Professor LaCroix has served as a member of the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History, and she is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of American Constitutional History and the American Journal of Legal History. She teaches constitutional law, legal history, federal courts, civil procedure, and law and linguistics.