86.5

September

2019

I wish to thank The University of Chicago Law Revieweditors and Professor Emily Buss for improving this Comment at every stage of the process. I also wish to thank the Sentencing Project for providing me with the data this Comment uses in its empirical analysis and my friends Vivek Magati and Joshua Courtney for assisting me with developing this Comment’s methodology.

Support from the Stanford Center for Law and History and especially faculty director Amalia Kessler was invaluable as I completed this Article. For helpful comments and conversations, I thank Gregory Ablavsky, Kerry Abrams, Monique Abrishami, Susan Appleton, Ralph Richard Banks, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Katie Cole, Beth Colgan, Nancy F. Cott, Samuel Ennis, George Fisher, Barbara Fried, Lawrence Friedman, Robert W. Gordon, Howard Kaufman, Zachary D. Kaufman, Adriaan Lanni, Jessica Lowe, Kenneth W. Mack, Bernadette Meyler, Melissa Murray, Kelly Phipps, Eli Russell, Christopher Schmidt, Sarah Seo, David Sklansky, Ji Seon Song, Norman Spaulding, Emily Stolzenberg, Mark Storslee, Charles Tyler, Lael Weinberger, Robert Weisberg, John Wertheimer, and participants in the Stanford Law School Fellows Workshop, the Stanford Legal Studies Workshop, and the Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference. Librarians at Harvard University and Stanford Law School and archivists at the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library provided excellent assistance. Research for this Article was generously supported by the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Grant; the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Fellowship; Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies Dissertation Fellowship and Seed Grant; and Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s History and Public Policy Initiative in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance.