Fellow; Institute for Legal Studies
E-mail: nbuenger@wisc.edu
Office: 975 Bascom Mall
Biography
Nancy Buenger is a Fellow at the Institute for Legal Studies and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the College of Letters & Science, where she teaches in the undergraduate Legal Studies program. An interdisciplinary historian, her teaching and research interrelate law, religion, and science. Dr. Buenger holds a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2010-11 Law and Society Post-doctoral Fellowship at Wisconsin and the 2009-10 Alumni Fund Fellowship at the University of Minnesota Law School. She was a 2009 Fellow of the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at Wisconsin.
Dr. Buenger investigates the blowback from US expansion in the Americas and Asia. Her first book project Extraordinary Remedies focuses on equity jurisprudence, a Roman canonical heritage that has facilitated transnational exchange. Juryless equitable courts can look beyond the law's letter, crafting discretionary remedies from alternative legal traditions and ancient maxims designed as guides to conscience. A Chicago native, she has a special interest in Cook County's chancery, a leading national center for equity jurisprudence to the present day. A second project explores extraterritorial US tribunals in Asia.
Her Legal Studies courses include Legal Pluralism, exploring the global diversity of legal cultures, and Clues, tracing the spiritual and scientific beliefs that have informed criminal evidentiary practices. She was awarded a 2007 University of Chicago Von Holst Prize Lectureship for her course Spirituality and Statecraft in the Americas, which she designed and team-taught with a Latin American historian. A former Chicago History Museum conservator, her historical and museum publications include an academic prize-winning digital project on bioethics and human remains research.
