Congratulations to CAPS affiliate Justin L. Brooks for being honored with the 2025 Christian Bay Award by the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Critical Political Science section! Brooks, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Government, received this recognition for his paper “Juridical Occasions for Racial Formation: The Freedmen’s Bureau, Labor, and Private Law”.
The prestigious Christian Bay Award recognizes the best paper presented at the previous year’s annual meeting and celebrates research that advances democratic and egalitarian scholarship. Brooks’ interdisciplinary work stands at the intersection of Black political thought and critical legal theory.
His paper re-examines the Reconstruction era by casting a critical eye on the Freedmen’s Bureau and its underexplored role in shaping private contract law for emancipated Black Americans. Focusing on a rare court case from Tallahassee, Florida, Brooks utilizes microhistory to probe how Freedmen’s courts operated as “juridical occasions for racial formation.” His analysis reveals the ways in which race, contract law, and institutional power intertwined to constrain Black labor and autonomy even as legal rights ostensibly expanded.