Barry Cushman came to Notre Dame in 2012 following fifteen years on the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he was the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History. Cushman’s scholarship examines the relations among constitutional law, political economy, and social reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His book, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford University Press), was awarded the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society.

Cushman has taught in a wide variety of subject-matter areas, including Constitutional Law, Property, Trusts & Estates, Estate & Gift Taxation, Estate Planning, American Intellectual & Cultural History, and numerous courses and seminars in American Legal and Constitutional History. In 2003, he was honored with the University of Virginia’s All-University Teaching Award. At Notre Dame Cushman also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Political Science.

Before entering teaching, Cushman practiced as an estate planning and probate attorney with the Los Angeles firm of Riordan & McKinzie. He has held research fellowships at New York University School of Law and in the Politics Department at Princeton University, and has served on the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

Courses Taught

Advanced Trusts and Estates
American Constitutional History Before the Civil War
American Constitutional History From the Civil War to World War II
American Intellectual and Cultural History to 1865
American Legal History
Colloquium in American Legal History
Constitutional Law
Estate and Gift Taxation
Estate Planning
Property
Trusts and Estates
American Expansion and American Law (seminar)
The Constitution and Reform Movements (seminar)
The Family in 19th-Century America (seminar)
Judicial Biography (seminar)
Law and Political Economy in the Antebellum United States (seminar)
The Lochner Era (seminar)
Modern American Legal History (seminar)
The New Deal and the Transformation of the American Legal Order (seminar)
Slavery and the Law (seminar)

Scholarship

Book:

Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Book Chapters:

“The Constitutional Foundations of the New Deal Securities Laws,” in Federalism Reconsidered: New Directions in American Legal History (Patricia Minter, ed., University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).

“Federalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution ( Karen Orren & John Compton, eds., forthcoming).

“The Clerks to Justices George Sutherland and Pierce Butler,” in Of Courtiers and Kings: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices (Todd C. Peppers & Clare Cushman, eds., University of Virginia Press, 2015).

Clerking for Scrooge (reviewing David J. Garrow & Dennis Hutchinson, eds., The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR’s Washington) 70 U. Chi. L. Rev. 721 (2003).