News

Cynthia Nicoletti, a scholar of American legal history focusing on the Civil War and Reconstruction era, has joined the Duke Law School faculty. 

Nicoletti is the author of Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis, for which she won the Cromwell Book Prize. She comes to Duke from University of Virginia School of Law, where she was the Paul G. Mahoney Research Professor of Law and Professor of History, and will teach property law and other classes beginning in spring 2027. 

“Cynthia Nicoletti is a prize-winning scholar and celebrated teacher whose work has fundamentally advanced our understandings of the Civil War and its enduring constitutional legacies,” said H. Timothy Lovelace, Professor of Law and John Hope Franklin Research Scholar. 

“Her scholarship exemplifies the very best of interdisciplinary legal inquiry, bringing together history, law, and political development with remarkable rigor and insight. Cynthia's arrival will strengthen Duke Law's already vibrant intellectual community and create exciting new opportunities for students to study American legal history, particularly the history of the South and its central role in shaping the nation's constitutional development.” 

Originally from Manhattan, Nicoletti earned her bachelor’s degree in history from UVA, followed by a JD from Harvard Law School. She returned to UVA for master’s and doctoral degrees in history and won the Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History for her work on the legal status of secession after the Civil War. Nicoletti joined the UVA faculty in 2014 and has been recognized for teaching excellence by both student groups and the university. She has won numerous fellowships and grants and published articles and essays in both legal and historical journals.

Nicoletti said she’s long regarded the Civil War era as the most fascinating aspect of American history, and an ideal case study for exploring how the rule of law functions in the midst of a crisis. Intertwining legal, political, and social history, her scholarship examines the role of lawyers, judges, and legal arguments and institutions in shaping how the United States reckoned with its most significant rupture and responded to fundamental questions it raised, including nationhood, state sovereignty, and secession; race, emancipation, and the rights of formerly enslaved people; civil liberties; and treason.

In Secession on Trial, Nicoletti examines the federal government’s efforts to prosecute Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, for treason and the legal machinations and decisions that ultimately prevented the case from going to trial. 

Davis’s lawyer sought to avoid a trial that might lead to a death sentence, and so he sought to exploit the government’s worries about the case’s uncertain outcome. Davis could potentially have argued that secession was constitutionally permissible, making him a non-citizen who could not be charged for treason, at trial in Richmond. His legal team raised the prospect that Davis might be acquitted and secession vindicated in a court of law, thereby undermining the Union’s victory on the battlefield. In response, the government decided not to prosecute. Two months later, in April 1869, secession was ruled unconstitutional in a separate case.

A hallmark of Nicoletti’s research as a historical “detective” is delving into non-traditional sources like diaries and other accounts of lived experiences to understand not only the reasoning of the actors in deciding legal questions, but also the impact of the choices they made and the war itself. 

“I’m interested in how people on the ground are thinking about war, how it is shaping and changing their lives, and how that is reflected in the law,” Nicoletti said. 

“I’m also really interested in how law shapes the war and the experience of war. The standard story about the Civil War is that law disappears, and it's really sort of a law-free period. But I don't think so at all. I think that actors are constantly thinking about legal rules.”

Nicoletti’s recent scholarship focuses on Reconstruction-era land policy and the property rights of freed people. She is currently at work on a second book that explains why land redistribution, a proposal to seize land from former Confederates after the Civil War and transfer it to freed people, fell through.

“The traditional story is this was a program that only a few radicals really believed in, so it never got off the ground,” Nicoletti said. “Actually, it was pretty built out, but after the war a group of lawyers unraveled it piece by piece and then sort of covered their tracks to make it seem like it was never actually a real program.”

Nicoletti said she is excited to join Duke’s scholarly community and reunite with former UVA colleagues including Lovelace. 

“As a university situated in the region that figures so prominently in her scholarship, Duke Law is especially well positioned to benefit from her expertise and teaching,” Lovelace said. “We could not be more excited to welcome Cynthia to Duke Law.”