Emily Prifogle

Beginning in Fall 2020, Emily Prifogle is an Assistant Professor in the Law School, with an untenured appointment in the Department of History. Her primary fields of interest are in twentieth-century legal history and include the study of place, local governance, gender, sexuality, and race, and her scholarship incorporates the methods of legal, social, and political history.

Prifogle’s current book project argues that the legal remaking of rural communities was a central feature of twentieth-century America. The project utilizes case studies to examine critical topics that historians and legal scholars have framed as quintessentially urban issues—land use and zoning, policing and prosecution, education equality, labor and economic opportunity, local community organizing and advocacy, and infrastructure and mobility—and reveals their manifestations in rural geographies, economies, and social norms. The result is a new legal history that tells not a story of rural decline but a story of the rural Midwest in a constant process of transformation along lines of class, race, and gender.

You can learn more about Professor Prifogle’s scholarship at www.emilyprifogle.com.  
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Selected Publications:

“Legal Landscapes, Migrant Labor, and Rural Social Safety Nets: A World of Neighbors and Strangers in Michigan before State v. Shack, 1942-1965,” (forthcoming with Law & Social Inquiry).

“Law and Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, and Hours Restrictions in Muller v. Oregon,” (forthcoming 2020 with Studies in Law, Policy & Society).

“Winks, Whispers, and Prosecutorial Discretion in Rural Iowa, 1925-1928,” (forthcoming 2020 with Annals of Iowa)

“Law and Local Activism: Uncovering the Civil Rights History of Chambers v. Mississippi,” California Law Review 101 (2013):445.