Sovereignty Project Hosts Preconference at American Society for Legal History 2025
On November 13, 2025, the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project hosted a preconference symposium on American imperial administration, followed by a dinner reception at the Detroit Institute of Arts and a keynote conversation between Professor of Law Maggie Blackhawk (NYU Law) and Professor Alfred William McCoy (University of Wisconsin, Madison, History).
Forty-two scholars convened in Detroit to attend the symposium, titled Imperial Administration: Law, Colonialism, and the Growth of the U.S. Administrative State and organized by Maggie Blackhawk, Andrea Scoseria Katz (University of Washington in St. Louis Law), and Noah Rosenblum (NYU Law). The day-long convening explored a critical but understudied topic: the relationship between the United States’ imperial projects and the development of administration—both administrative law doctrines and the institutions of the administrative state.
The symposium brought together scholars from a range of backgrounds, including historians of empire, scholars of the administrative state, experts on the history of U.S. territories, specialists in Native legal history, and scholars of U.S. colonialism, among others, to bring the history of U.S. imperial administration into focus. The symposium aimed not simply to workshop works-in-progress but develop a research agenda for the field and create a community to support and mentor junior scholars with related projects. During the lightning round, every participant had the opportunity to present their research pertinent to American imperial administration.
Directly after the symposium concluded, over a hundred scholars gathered for a dinner reception and keynote conversation at the Detroit Institute of Arts to celebrate the launch of a new initiative on the study of U.S. empire and colonial administration. The evening opened with guided tours of the special exhibit Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation, and remarks from the curator. Dinner was served in the Rivera Court, a venue renowned for Diego M. Rivera’s panoramic murals of industrial Detroit. Professor Ned Blackhawk (Yale History) introduced the keynote, Capillaries of Empire: From Colonial Rule to Global Hegemony. Professors Maggie Blackhawk and Alfred William McCoy discussed how the transformative process of U.S. colonial rule in the Caribbean and the Pacific percolated back to the metropole through the “capillaries of empire.” They queried empire as a reciprocal process, in which 19th-century Indian wars worked as a template for the military domination of U.S. colonies.
Over the next two days of the American Society for Legal History conference, the Sovereignty Project set up an exhibitor booth. At the booth, staff member Grace Ellis shared information about the Project’s research and advocacy work, in addition to promoting the upcoming conference this March, First America: The Legacies of the Declaration of Independence for Native Nations.
