In 1960, the Littleton-Griswold Fund Committee discussed the initiation of a prize worth $500 to be awarded biennially for the best article on legal history. A year later the committee created the Littleton-Griswold Prize for studies in the legal history of the American colonies and of the United States prior to 1900. The prize was not awarded, however, until 1966, and was abolished the following year. In 1985, Council revived the prize as an annual award of $1,000 for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society. The revived prize is administered by a joint committee of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History.

2023
William J. Novak, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard Univ. Press)

2022
Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton & Co.)

2021
Douglas J. Flowe, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

2020
Sarah Seo, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press)

2019
Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2018
Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press)

2017
Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford Univ. Press)

2016
Deborah Rosen, Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood (Harvard Univ. Press)

2015
Cornelia Dayton and Sharon Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)

2014
Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Univ. of Chicago Press)

2013
John Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (Free Press)

2012
Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard Univ. Press)

2011
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-88 (Simon & Schuster)

2010
Catherine Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Harvard Univ. Press)

2009
Laura Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

2008
Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2007
Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (Cornell Univ. Press)

2006
Daniel Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

2005
Mary Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard Univ. Press)

2004
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton Univ. Press)

2003
Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of Amercian Independence (Harvard Univ. Press)

2002
Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2001
Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Univ. of California Press)

2000
Gail O'Brien, The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1999
Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill and Wang)

1998
Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court. The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford Univ. Press)

1997
William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in 19th-Century America (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1996
Daniel Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Univ. of Illinois Press)

1995
Morton Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-33 (Harvard Univ. Press)

1994
G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (Oxford Univ. Press)

1993
Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge Univ. Press)

1992
Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937 (Harvard Univ. Press)

1991
Laura Kalman, Abe Fortas (Yale Univ. Press)

1990
Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1989
William Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Rhetoric to Judicial Doctrine (Harvard Univ. Press)

1988
Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and the Law in California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

1987
Mark Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1986
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth Century America (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1985
R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

1966
L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller Zobel, The Legal Papers of John Adams (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press)