The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law has named Professor William Novak as a recipient of its Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History.
Novak, the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law, will be one of five Polan Fellows for the 2026-27 year. According to the announcement, the fellows “will work to counter the US Supreme Court’s embrace of originalism. They will use the Brennan Center’s platform and resources to develop research, writing, and other projects that support methods of constitutional interpretation grounded in the document’s democratic principles.”
Novak teaches in the fields of legal history, legislation, and regulation, and his research interests focus on the history of the modern American regulatory state. Among other works, he is the author of two Littleton-Griswold Prize-winning books on the history of US regulation and administration.
His fellowship will focus on a related, third book exploring conceptions of democracy from the founding era and what this democratic origin story means for us today. He recently answered five questions about the fellowship and his work:
1. What does it mean to you to be named a Polan Fellow, particularly at this point in our history?
It’s a truly exciting honor. I first connected with NYU’s Brennan Center through their Historians’ Council, which has been producing some pretty significant Supreme Court amicus briefs of late.
The Polan Fellowship’s broader orientation toward recovering an alternative American democratic constitutional tradition resonated with my current intellectual and scholarly agenda—and the relationship of democracy and law simply couldn’t be a more urgent topic today, as we approach the country’s 250th anniversary.
Special bonus: I get to work again with Kate Andrias, our wonderful former Michigan Law colleague, who will also join me as a Polan Fellow this year.
2. What project do you plan to pursue during your fellowship?
I’m working on a book-length history of the American revolutionary and constitutional period (roughly 1765 to 1789) that emphasizes exactly such democratic legal-constitutional elements. When added to my previous research monographs, The People’s Welfare and New Democracy, this new book can be seen as Volume I, completing a trilogy on legislation, regulation, and administration in US history from the American Revolution straight through to the New Deal.
In my opinion, still too much of our constitutional origin stories remain shrouded in national myth and political fable (what Jerome Frank once provocatively called “stork-fibs” and “Peter Pan legends”). The Polan Fellowship provides an opportunity to return a more pragmatic and critical-realist perspective to constitutional analysis, emphasizing the more public, participatory, democratic, and egalitarian components of our constitutional tradition.
3. How did you first get interested in this subject?
Since graduate school, I have consistently stumbled on fact after fact from the archives that just didn’t fit the conventional constitutional narratives that I had been taught since grammar school. Interested in regulation and administration, I was told there was really no point investigating anything before the New Deal, or maybe the Interstate Commerce Commission, as the early part of our history was mostly about individualism, laissez-faire, private property rights, and the absence of a strong American regulatory state.
My histories have found otherwise. Most recently, while completing New Democracy in 2022, I stumbled upon a World War I-era Justice Department report on historical precedents for robust emergency legislation. Some 800 pages of this 1,000-page volume were stuffed with statutes from the states during the American Revolution—legislation regulating prices, confiscating property, establishing public utilities and public works, organizing the militia, suppressing dissent, preserving order, and policing morality.
Needless to say, this isn’t the as-advertised American Revolution of liberty-obsessed minutemen that I learned about in a whole lot of previous schooling—so I just had to figure out for myself what’s going on amid this regulatory onslaught at the very start of this independent nation, in the heart of an age of so-called democratic revolution.
4. In broad terms, what is the state of our democracy as the country approaches its 250th birthday?
I don’t know of a single reflective researcher, scholar, or intellectual who doesn’t think that our democracy is currently in some kind of crisis. But in such crisis times, I would contend, history—especially constitutional history—remains a useful schoolhouse.
One of my intellectual heroes, John Dewey, used to argue that democracy is not a final concept or fixed idea—it is but a history. And democratic crisis has been a perennial feature of that history.
The American Revolution was just such a crisis, so too the Civil War and the battles against slavery and racial subordination, so too the struggle against economic stratification and deprivation during the industrial revolution, and, of course, ditto the mid-20th century wars against totalitarian authoritarianism. When seen as a history, democracy remains always unfinished, yet also very much in our own hands.
5. How can we, as individuals and institutions, help ensure our democracy survives another 250 years?
In an era of unprecedented and limitless private diversions and distractions, we should struggle to keep our eyes, attention, and focus firmly fixed on the public things—literally, the res publica—that the late historian Gordon Wood placed at the threshold of “the creation of the American republic.”
One of my other intellectual heroes, Hannah Arendt, defined “dark times” as periods in which the “public realm” becomes so “obscured,” so “dubious,” and so “despised” that people ask no more of politics than that it serve personal, private, and ultimately petty or corrupt interests.
In such crisis times, I would argue, it is more important than ever to recover the actual public law history of the United States—legislation, regulation, and administration—and to learn from the challenges and struggles of past generations to secure the people’s welfare in a modern democratic republic.