Rate My Professor Christian Fritz

Christian G. Fritz is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (1975), a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (1978), and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1986). Fritz was the first to complete a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley along with a law degree from Hastings. He joined the UNM School of Law faculty in 1987, pioneering the introduction of legal history to first-year students, an innovative concept in legal education. He has taught a variety of legal history courses and Property, contributing deep knowledge of legal and constitutional history through exhaustive research.

Fritz's research specializations include legal history, constitutional history, American constitutional tradition, state constitutionalism, federalism, popular sovereignty, Common Law legal tradition, comparative legal perspectives between Common Law and Civil Law systems, the role of law and lawyers, legal education, non-Western concepts of law, Alternative Dispute Resolution, and changing perceptions of law in America. Key publications encompass books such as Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2023), American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (2008), Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851-1891 (1991), and chapters like Interposition: An Overlooked Tool of American Constitutionalism (2013). He has published articles in Rutgers Law Journal, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, American Journal of Legal History, Albany Law Review, and Pacific Historical Review, including 'Out From Under the Shadow of the Federal Constitution: An Overlooked American Constitutionalism' (2010) and 'Recovering the Lost Worlds of America’s Written Constitutions' (2005). In 2011, Fritz was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History for a three-year term. A symposium on his 2023 book featured on Balkinization drew contributions from six legal scholars nationwide. His scholarship has shaped scholarly discourse on state legislative resistance, interposition, and popular sovereignty in American federalism.