Jed Handelsman  Shugerman

Biography

Jed Handelsman Shugerman joined BU Law in 2023 after spending a year as a visiting professor. He received his BA, JD, and PhD (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard U. Press 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History.

Shugerman teaches Torts, Civil Procedure, Property, Federal Courts, Administrative Law/Legislation and Regulation, and the Clark Legal History Workshop. The Harvard Federalist Society awarded him its Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award (2011) for teaching, mentorship, and “for commitment to substantive debate and the free exchange of ideas.”

He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America. The first is tentatively titled “A Faithful President: The Founders v. the Originalists,” offering a history of the Founding and the presidency that challenges the modernist assumptions on the left and right. This book draws on his articles “Vesting” (Stanford Law Review 2022), “Removal of Context” (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2022), a co-authored “Faithful Execution and Article II” (Harvard Law Review 2019 with Andrew Kent and Ethan Leib), “Venality,” (Notre Dame Law Review 2024), “Quasi-Judicial” (Columbia Law Review, forthcoming 2026, with Beau Baumann), “The Indecisions of 1789” (Penn. Law Review 2022), “Presidential Removal as Article I, Not Article II” with former BU colleague Gary Lawson (Northwestern U. L. Rev. 2026), “Major Questions about Presidentialism” with Jodi Short (B.C. Law Rev. 2025), and “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” (Stanford Law Review 2014). The book rebuts the unitary executive theory and “presidentialist” ideologies of administrations of both parties and of Justices across the ideological spectrum. This history supports the traditions of “fiduciary constitutionalism,” independent agencies, and limited presidential power, with surprising twists about the foundations of the modern administrative state (like the “venality of office,” offices-as-property, and the Anglo-American tradition of Treasury independence and “quasi-judicial” offices).

The next book project is “The Prosecutor Politicians: Race, War, and the Rise of Mass Incarceration,” focusing on California Governor Earl Warren, his presidential running mate Thomas Dewey, the Kennedys, World War II and the Cold War, the war on crime, the growth of prosecutorial power, and its emergence as a stepping stone to electoral power for ambitious politicians in the mid-twentieth century. One of the most significant causes of mass incarceration is that American prosecutors doubled their rates of turning arrests into prosecutions in the late twentieth century. This book will explain how prosecutors transformed from low-prestige, marginal figures throughout most of American history into arguably the most powerful officers over Americans’ lives. He published a summary of this argument in the context of Vice President Kamala Harris’s career and campaign in the N.Y. Times in 2024. He has posted an initial book summary and a draft chapter on Earl Warren’s background as tough-on-crime, immigration-crackdown prosecutor and his role in the Japanese internment immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Each of these books was shaped by his experience with clinical death penalty defense work and prisoners’ rights litigation as a law student and a graduate student. He is also a co-author of amicus briefs on an originalist defense of birthright citizenship (based on his article “An Originalist Case for Birthright Citizenship”), the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases. He wrote a series of essays about Trump investigations and impeachments, and other legal issues: seven guest essays in the New York Times, four in the Washington Post, over forty in Slate, as well as multiple essays in the Atlantic, Politico, Lawfare, and other media.

Shugerman writes about law, history, politics, and sometimes sports on Shugerblog.com. He is a fan of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and the Alabama Crimson Tide.