Robert J. Cottrol

Robert J. Cottrol came to the George Washington University in 1995 as a visiting professor of law and legal history in the law school. Previously, he had taught at Rutgers University and Boston College, and had visited at the University of Virginia. Professor Cottrol is a specialist in American and Comparative Legal History. He also teaches criminal law, law and society in Latin America, and a seminar on the Second Amendment. In addition to being the Harold Paul Green Research Professor in the law school, he is also a Professor of History and Sociology in the Columbian College at the George Washington University. In addition to advising law students, he has served on thesis and dissertation committees in the history and sociology departments. His writings on law and history have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, the Boston University Law Review, Texas Law Review, American Quarterly, American Journal of Legal History, Law and Society Review, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, and the Latin American Research Review, among other journals. He has also been a contributor to the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History and the Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law. His writings have been cited in opinions in the United States Supreme Court and the Third and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals, among other courts.

Professor Cottrol’s first book, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era, was selected by Choice as an outstanding academic book for 1983. He is the editor of Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment, which was a Book of the Month selection by the History Book Club. He was also the editor of From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England.  Professor Cottrol’s co-authored book Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution won the Langum Project Prize for Historical Literature in 2003 and was a "Book of the Month” selection of the History Book Club. In 2013, he published The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American Hemisphere, a comparative study in legal history that explored the role of law in constructing systems of racial hierarchy in the Americas.

Professor Cottrol’s latest book, To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment (co-author Brannon Denning), was published at the end of 2023 by the University Press of Kansas. It was awarded the Thomas M. Cooley book prize by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution in 2025. He is currently working on a co-edited volume, Scenes from the Shadows: Afro-Argentine Life in the Twentieth Century (co-editor Lea Geler), under contract with Ohio University Press

Professor Cottrol has lectured on American law at the Pontifical University of Rio Grande do Sul and the Federal Universities of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.  An adjunct professor at La Universidad del Salvador (USAL) in Buenos Aires, he has also lectured at the law faculties of La Universidad de Buenos Aires, La Universidad del Museo Social, and La Universidad de Palermo in Argentina. He annually brings colleagues from the George Washington University Law School to join him in lecturing on US Law at La Universidad del Salvador (USAL) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and sponsors professors from USAL in lecturing on Argentine law at GW. In 2023, he taught a course on law in American Economic History at the University of Augsburg in Bavaria, Germany.