William J. Novak is an award-winning legal scholar and historian and 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 previously was 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. He also co-edited a volume on The Democratic Experiment in 2003 with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, and a volume on Boundaries of the State in U.S. History in 2015 with Jim Sparrow and Steve Sawyer. He is currently collaborating with Naomi Lamoreaux and The Tobin Project on a volume on The Corporation and American Democracy. He also continues to work on his own monographic research project, "The Creation of the Modern American State."