Special Book-Launch Seminar: New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State

Talks from the Hoover Institution

Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Hoover Institution | Stanford University

On behalf of the Hoover Applied History Working Group, Dr. Niall Ferguson welcomes Anthony Gregory to vibrantly discuss his recent book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State.

ABOUT THE TALK

This special book talk discovers how the 1930s redefined law and order, transforming liberalism and reshaping American government itself. We remember the New Deal as foundational to modern liberalism, but its crucial role in building the law-and-order state has gone neglected. This HAHWG seminar will look to Franklin Roosevelt’s war on crime for lessons on how political legitimacy relies on enforcement authority and consider the implications for today’s fraught politics of law and order.

The book is available for purchase here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University. He is a legal and policy historian of the American state. He was previously an assistant professor in residence at Rhode Island School of Design’s Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences. He earned his PhD in History at the University of California Berkeley, where he trained as an Americanist studying politics and law, and spent two years as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project before beginning at RISD. Gregory is the author of multiple academic publications on national security, constitutionalism, and legal theory and is currently working on modern American liberalism and criminal justice, particularly on how the New Deal war on crime legitimated and transformed U.S. governance.