Anthony Gregory

Anthony Gregory is a legal and political historian of the United States. He has researched and taught on American politics and law, constitutionalism, liberalism, crime and punishment, and the security state.  He is working on a book called Building Law and Order, which argues that New Deal criminal justice policy achieved political legitimacy around a broad agenda of opposing lawlessness. The book shows how President Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer Cummings formed new relations that bridged partisan, ideological, regional, institutional, racial and class divides to expand crime-fighting powers at all levels of government. This New Deal undertaking transformed federalism and liberalism and modernized American politics. 

Gregory received his History PhD at UC Berkeley, where he also studied as an undergraduate. Before coming to RISD he was a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. At both universities he enjoyed teaching survey and specialized courses. His publications have explored the long political and legal arc of American history and include two books, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror (2013) and American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment (2016), as well as articles in Law and History Review and The Journal of the Early Republic.