Susan Pearson’s “The Birth Certificate” wins 2022 Order of the Coif Book Award

Susan J. Pearson, Professor of History at Northwestern, has been awarded the 2022 Book Award by the Order of the Coif Executive Committee, for her 2021 book The Birth Certificate: An American History.

The Order of the Coif is the national honorary society for law school graduates. According to their website, The Order of the Coif Book Award is given to those that “have advanced a field, illuminated new areas of thought and research, and/or explored the many hard questions that law raises.”

Pearson is a historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States focusing on Legal and Criminal History, Political and Policy History, and Gender and Sexuality History. The Birth Certificate examines how birth registration became compulsory in the United States, moving from rarely-used formality to vital bureaucratic document with tremendous social and legal value. Pearson’s research spans 200 years and was conducted in no less than 22 local, state, federal, and private archives.

“This impeccable and captivating work of historical scholarship will appeal to any historian of the postbellum United States, but particularly to social historians, intellectual historians, and historians of science and technology,” says Emily Klancher Merchant, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Davis. “Pearson brilliantly weaves together a variety of archival sources to elucidate the intersection between lived experience, state bureaucracy, and systems of epistemic authority.”

Read an excerpt from the book:

“Those who promoted birth registration, whether as a form of population knowledge or as a form of identification, hoped that proper laws, forms, and record-keeping practices could create stable, uniform knowledge. In practice, this often failed—not only because doctors, midwives, and clerks often deviated from the letter of the law as they failed to register births or to fill out forms properly but also because ordinary people contested the categories that governments devised to know them by. More than anything, these conflicts remind us that selves are made, not born.”

Read more about Pearson’s book.