William J. Novak

Bill Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He teaches in the fields of legal history, legislation, and regulation, and his research interests focus on the history of the modern American regulatory state.

Novak previously was a professor of history at the University of Chicago and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 1996, he published The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press), which won the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for Best Book in the History of Law and Society. In 2023, he published a sequel, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, which also won the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold Prize as well as the Morgan Prize for best book on the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

In addition to some 50 articles, he has also co-edited four additional books: The Democratic Experiment (Princeton University Press, 2003) with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, The State in U.S. History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) with Jim Sparrow and Steve Sawyer, The Corporation and American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2017) with Naomi Lamoreaux and The Tobin Project, and Antimonopoly and American Democracy with Dan Crane and The Tobin Project.

He is currently at work on a new legal history of the American founding from the perspective of law, regulation, administration, and statecraft.