By Suzi Morales
Craig Green loves history. He has two advanced degrees in history that he says changed his life. He frequently studies the impact of history on how the practice of law is carried out today. According to Green, “The past is all over the law.”
But Green’s version of history isn’t about stale facts. As the Charles Klein Professor of Law and Government at Temple University Beasley School of Law, he applies his boundless curiosity to studying and teaching how the past informs the present and future in a range of legal subjects from civil rights to civil procedure.
To law school…and back again
Growing up, Green didn’t know any lawyers. He enjoyed high school and college debate and loved learning, all of which led him to law school. After graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for Judge Louis Pollak of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, as well as Merrick Garland in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. After clerking, he took a position as a staff attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.
As Green advanced at the DOJ, he yearned to ask the large, systemic questions that he didn’t have resources to analyze in the course of his day-to-day lawyering. As he began looking for what other jobs might be available in law, he turned to his mentor, Judge Pollak, who encouraged him to consider academia. (Incidentally, Pollak also presided over Green’s wedding, which took place across a dinner table.)
After a few years of teaching, Green became curious about the historical basis for legal doctrine and applied to graduate history programs. He earned a master’s in history 2012 and a PhD in 2018, both from Princeton University.
History changed everything
“The history program changed my life,” says Green. “It changed every single thing that I think about everything: about myself, about my law teaching, about the nature of law, about the nature of the country, about the nature of my family, about the way human beings work.”
In studying history, Green has gained all sorts of expertise about the present. Media outlets frequently ask him to weigh in on everything from the presidency to Chevron deference, the doctrine of when the judiciary should defer to federal agencies that was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2024.
Writing on behalf of the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Solicitor General, recently cited Green’s work on Chevron deference in that Supreme Court case. Green’s 2021 article, “Chevron Debates and the Constitutional Transformation of Administrative Law,” which was cited, argued against overruling the case of Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. on Constitutional grounds. After the Supreme Court overruled Chevron deference, media outlets called on Green’s expertise to help explain the impact of the decision, which he says marks a major shift in government power away from agencies of the executive branch and toward courts.
Green has an active and varied research and writing agenda. Inspired by his mentor Judge Pollak, who was the dean of Yale Law School from 1965 to 1970, he is working on an oral history of Black Yale Law students in the 1960s and 70s. His co-author on the project prior to her passing in 2023 was former Temple University President JoAnne Epps.
The state of states
Green also often writes about the makeup and nature of the United States, questioning assumptions that many schoolchildren are taught in their civics classes. For example, in an article titled “United/States: A Revolutionary History of American Statehood,” he challenged conventional wisdom that states originated directly from thirteen British colonies, before the creation of any collective “United States.” In fact, Green’s research concluded that there never were “thirteen” colonies because the modern state of Delaware was part of colonial Pennsylvania at the time.
Green is currently working on a book that expands on the theme of formation of statehood and what states’ place in the legal framework of the U.S. is and should be. These questions continue to shape the discourse, Green says, for example, as border states seek to activate National Guard units in response to what those states’ governors are calling an “invasion” by immigrants.
Green notes that arguments about state sovereignty have been cited on topics including abortion, immigration, and climate change. But, he says, the arguments are not grounded in the history of the U.S. “Arguing that states have the God-given constitutionally rooted rights to decide about making war is an extraordinary, profound transformation contradicting ideas that would have been thought solid since the Civil War until five years ago,” he remarks.
In the classroom, Green tries to help his students grapple with ambiguity. He often tells them, “I’m not interested in teaching them Wikipedia law. … I am interested in teaching them how to struggle over undecided questions and the way to do that, it seems to me, is to find other undecided questions that people have struggled over and look at how they struggled and learn from what they struggled with.”
Ultimately, Green hopes to pass along his interest in the historical formation of law so that others will also draw their own informed conclusions. “Ever since I started reading history stuff, it’s just totally scrambled the way that I think about things and it’s changed things for me,” he says. “Maybe it can change things for other people and if it changes things for enough people, … [we’ll] go around trying to tell the truth about things and trying to let people make decisions for themselves. I’m a believer that truth is better than the opposite.”