The Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History

About the Fellows

• Maureen Edobor

  Maureen Edobor is an assistant professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law. As a Polan Fellow, Edobor will organize forums marking the 250th anniversary of the Articles of Confederation, the United States’s first constitution. This series will consider why the framers replaced the weak, decentralized system of government under the Articles with our current Constitution — and consider its relevance to 21st-century originalism.

• Duncan Hosie

  Duncan Hosie is an associate in the Orrick law firm’s Supreme Court and appellate practice. With support from the Polan Fellowship, Hosie will produce scholarship documenting the rapid pace of legal change under the Roberts Court. He will also organize events focused on the constitutional vision of two leading jurists of the Warren Court, Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall.

• Terrence L. Johnson

  Terrence L. Johnson is a professor of African American religious studies at the Harvard Divinity School. Johnson’s fellowship will apply a religious framework to constitutional interpretation to better understand originalism as a tool that sustains racism and gender bias. He will also host an event exploring Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s deployment and interrogation of originalist arguments.

• Brian Phillips Murphy

  Brian Phillips Murphy is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark. As a Polan Fellow, Murphy will pursue twin projects relating to early state constitutions: publishing searchable, digital editions of the New York and Pennsylvania constitutions and sponsoring academic seminars on the significance of state constitutions in the American federal and constitutional tradition.

• Diann Rust-Tierney

  Diann Rust-Tierney is the executive director of the Racial Justice Institute at Georgetown University, where she also serves as an adjunct professor of law. Rust-Tierney’s project will catalyze new scholarship on the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to preserve the current analysis based on American society’s “evolving standards of decency,” which originalist advocacy seeks to overturn.