Jane Manners is a legal historian who teaches Torts, Legislation, and a seminar on American legal history. She has written on the development of congressional petitioning, early American understandings of the president’s war powers, and the evolution of laws governing officer removal.
Before joining the Temple Law faculty in 2021, Manners held fellowships at New York University School of Law, the New-York Historical Society, and Columbia Law School. In 2018, she completed her Ph.D. in American history at Princeton University. Her dissertation, Congress and the Problem of Legislative Discretion, 1790-1870, explores the changing logic of congressional decisionmaking over the course of the nineteenth century, focusing on the extent to which concepts we typically associate with courts, such as precedent, legal principle, and vested rights, shaped understandings of legislative power. Manners’s articles have appeared in the Fordham Law Review and the Columbia Law Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, among other publications.
In addition to her PhD from Princeton, Manners has a BA and a JD from Harvard. She has a courtesy appointment as Affiliated Faculty in the Temple College of Liberal Arts’ history department.
Before law school, Manners worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a grantmaker. After law school, she clerked for Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In 2018, Manners was named a Preyer Scholar by the American Society for Legal History for her article “’Storehouse of the Industry of the Nation’: Fire and Federalism in the Age of Jackson.” Her work has been funded by, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation.