Christopher Tomlins' newest book is Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865, forthcoming in September 2010 from Cambridge University Press.

"Freedom Bound is a truly magisterial work by one of the finest minds currently working in the field of legal history ..."
John Comaroff (the University of Chicago)

"Tomlins' learned and masterful volume may well turn out to be the most important work published in American history over the last quarter century."
Jack P. Greene (The Johns Hopkins University)

"Christopher Tomlins has written a passionate, provocative, brilliant book ... Freedom Bound is, by any standard, a magisterial work of stunning originality."
Bruce H. Mann (Harvard Law School)

More advance notices and prepurchase information can be found on Amazon and from CUP's online catalog at http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521137772

Freedom Bound is about the origins of modern America – a history of colonizing, work, and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were planted in occupied territories, how they were populated with migrants – free and unfree – to do the work of colonizing, and how the newcomers secured possession. It tells of the new civic lives that seemed possible in new commonwealths, and of the constraints that kept many from enjoying them. It follows the story long past the end of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War, when – just for a moment – it seemed that freedom might finally be unbound.

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Tomlins is author or editor of six other books, most recently the Three Volume Cambridge History of Law in America, with Michael Grossberg. His work has been awarded the Surrency prize of the American Society for Legal History, the Littleton-Griswold prize of the American Historical Association and the Hurst prize of the Law and Society Association. Tomlins has also published more than a hundred chapters, articles, working papers and other essays.

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I am currently Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. UC Irvine's law school is a new institution that has attracted nationwide attention in the legal and academic communities. Before coming to California in 2009 I was a full-time Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Before joining the American Bar Foundation I was Reader in Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where I taught from 1980 until 1992. I have also taught at the Marshall-Wythe Law School, College of William & Mary in Virginia; Northwestern University Law School; and at the Faculties of Law at Tel Aviv and Haifa universities in Israel. I have been a visiting scholar at the Law School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Center for the Study of Recent American History at Johns Hopkins, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at William & Mary, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sydney University Law School.