William Novak

William Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He teaches in the fields of legal history, legislation, and regulation, and his research interests focus on the history of the modern American regulatory state. He is currently at work on a new democratic history of the American Founding from the perspective of law, regulation, administration, and statecraft.

Novak was previously a professor of history at the University of Chicago and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 1996, he published The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America, which won the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for Best Book in the History of Law and Society. In 2023, he published a sequel, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, which again won the Littleton-Griswold Prize as well as the Morgan Prize for best book on the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

In addition to writing some 50 articles, he has also coedited four additional books: The Democratic Experiment (2003) with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, The State in U.S. History (2015) with Jim Sparrow and Steve Sawyer, The Corporation and American Democracy (2017) with Naomi Lamoreaux and the Tobin Project, and Antimonopoly and American Democracy with Dan Crane and the Tobin Project.