Alison L. LaCroix

Alison L. LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where she is also an Associate Member of the History Department. She is a scholar of U.S. legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and 18th- and 19th-century legal thought.

LaCroix’s most recent book is The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024), which was awarded the Littleton-Griswold Prize by the American Historical Association and the SHEAR Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the book examines the transformation of U.S. constitutional law between the Founding and the Civil War.

LaCroix is also the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010). In 2021, President Biden appointed LaCroix to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University. She teaches constitutional law, legal history, and federal courts.