Christian G. Fritz
Professor Emeritus
Education
- B.A. 1975, Ph.D., 1986, University of California, Berkeley
- J.D. 1978, University of California, Hastings College of Law
- Member of the California Bar
Contact Information
Profile
Christian Fritz joined the UNM law faculty in 1987 to introduce legal history to first-year students, a new concept to legal education. Even today, few law schools offer such a course.
Fritz had just become the first person to complete a program at the University of California in which he earned a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley along with a law degree from Hastings College of Law. At the UNM law school, he teaches a variety of legal history courses along with Property. He contributes a deep knowledge of legal and constitutional history along with an exhaustive research style.
In addition to numerous articles, book chapters and reviews, Fritz has written books on legal history, including Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851-1891. In October 2007, Cambridge University Press published his long-term study: American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War.
American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory, and jurisprudence that sees today’s constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. It examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity – the people – would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant for the people to be the sovereign, and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today’s constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.
Courses
American Constitutional History
This seminar focuses on the historical context of ideas, events, and perceptions that led up to the creation of the federal constitution. Emphasis is placed on the effort to approach the federal constitution as 18th-century Americans did -- including the framers and proponents of the constitution and their opponents--the Anti-federalists. That insight leads up to a roundtable role play of historical participants in the debate over the proposed constitution.
The course also integrates other selected themes, such as natural law in the American constitutional tradition, the experience with 19th-century state constitution-making, and the constitutional challenges and implications of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Moreover, the course has a degree of flexibility to respond to and accommodate themes or issues of constitutional history of particular interest to the seminars participants.
Students are required to write a paper on any topic of their choice and toward the end of the semester will make presentations to the rest of the seminar based on their papers.
Comparative and Historical Legal Perspectives
This course is a wide-ranging historical introduction to our Common Law legal tradition. The course also provides a comparative legal perspective on the Common Law versus Civil Law systems. In addition, the course includes topics focusing on: the role of law and lawyers, legal education, non-Western concepts of law, so-called Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), and changing perceptions of law in America. Thus, the course offers comparative, historical, cultural, and jurisprudential dimensions to law. It establishes a broad context not only for other first-year courses, but for the student’s entire legal education and work as a lawyer.
Property I
This first year course is an introduction to the basic concepts of property law, focusing on the role of possession in allocating the various rights and responsibilities connected with personal and real property. The course covers acquisition of initial property rights, adverse possession, donative transfers, the evolution and nomenclature of interests in estates in land and future interest, concurrent property rights, and takings.
Property II
Primarily focuses on private land-use arrangements (especially non-possessory interests in land such as easements, real covenants, and equitable servitudes). Other topics include landlord/tenant law, problems arising in the contract for sale of land, methods of title assurance (including the operation of the recording acts), and nuisance. Focus is on general theory and practice, with side-glances at New Mexico law for illustrative purposes.
State Constitutional Law and History
Prerequisite: Constitutional Rights
This course explores the American constitutional tradition from a perspective that will reconceptualize standard assumptions about constitutionalism. Those standard assumptions entail views about American constitutional law and history that have been shaped by a predominant focus on the federal constitution. As a consequence of that focus, the significance of state constitutionalism and its history, as well as the interplay between state and federal constitutions, has not been fully appreciated. The course uncovers a new richness in constitutional law, theory, and history by focusing on the vibrant pattern of constitution-making in the states before and after the federal effort in 1787. We will then apply that learning to a series of contemporary issues in state constitutional law, with particular emphasis on the New Mexico constitution.
Publications
Books & Book Chapters
Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance (2023).
Available at: UNM-DR
Interposition: An Overlooked Tool of American Constitutionalism, Union and States' Rights: A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years After Sumter (Neil Cogan ed., 2013).
Available at: UNM-DR
American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (2008).
Available at: UNM-DR & view Color Map
A Constitutional Middle-Ground Between Revision and Revolution: A Reevaluation of The Nullification Crisis and The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Through The Lens of Popular Sovereignty, Law as Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honor of John Phillip Reid (Hendrik Hartog & William Nelson eds., 2000).
Available at: UNM-DR
Introduction, The Honorable Robert F. Peckham 1920-1993: His Legal, Political, and Judicial Life (1995).
Available at: UNM-DR
Constitutional Conventions, Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System: Studies of the Principal Structures, Processes, and Policies of Congress and the State Legislatures Since the Colonial Era (Joel H. Silbey ed., 1994).
Available at: UNM-DR
Constitution Making in the Nineteenth Century American West, Law for the Beaver, Law for the Elephant: Essays in the Legal History of the North American West (John McLaren, Hamar Foster & Chet Orloff, eds., 1992).
Available at: UNM-DR
Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851-1891 (1991).
Available at: UNM-DR
Due Process, Treaty Rights, and Chinese Exclusion, 1882-1891, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Sucheng Chan ed., 1991).
Available at: UNM-DR
A Judicial Odyssey: Federal Court in Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Monterey Counties (1985) (co-edited with Michael Griffith & Janet M. Hunter).
Available at: Your Library
Articles
The Complexity of American Federalism, Balkinization (2024).
Available at: UNM-DR
Interposition: A State-Based Constitutional Tool That Might Help Preserve American Democracy, Commonplace: the journal of early American life (June 2023).
Available at: UNM-DR
Monitoring American Federalism: The Overlooked Tool of Sounding the Alarm Interposition, 50 Shades of Federalism (May 2023).
Available at: UNM-DR
The Perils and Promise of Teaching Margaret Montoya's Máscaras Article in the First Year Law School Curriculum, HARVARD J. L. & GENDER 1 (2013).
Available at: UNM-DR
Teaching Legal History in the First Year Curriculum, 53 AM. J. OF LEGAL HIST. 379 (2013).
Available at: UNM-DR
Interposition and the Heresy of Nullification: James Madison and the Exercise of Sovereign Constitutional Powers, 41 FIRST PRINCIPLES: FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS TO GUIDE POLITICS AND POLICY 1 (February 21, 2012).
Available at: UNM-DR
Out From Under the Shadow of the Federal Constitution: An Overlooked American Constitutionalism, 41 RUTGERS L.J. 851 (2010).
Available at: UNM-DR
America's Unknown Constitutional World, 9.1 COMMON-PLACE (October 2008).
Available at: UNM-DR
Recovering the Lost Worlds of America’s Written Constitutions, 68 ALB. L. REV. 261 (2005).
Available at: UNM-DR
Fallacies of American Constitutionalism, 35 RUTGERS L.J. 1327 (2004).
Available at: UNM-DR
American Constitution-Making: The Neglected State Constitutional Sources, 27 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 199 (2000).
Available at: UNM-DR
A Nineteenth Century Habeas Corpus Mill: The Chinese Before the Federal Courts in California, 32 AM. J. LEGAL HIST. 347 (1988).
Available at: UNM-DR
Alternative Visions of American Constitutionalism: Popular Sovereignty and the Early American Constitutional Debate, 24 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 287 (1997).
Available at: UNM-DR
The American Constitutional Tradition Revisited: Preliminary Observations On State Constitution-Making In The Nineteenth-Century West, 25 RUTGERS L. J. 945 (1994).
Available at: UNM-DR
Popular Sovereignty, Vigilantism and the Constitutional Right of Revolution, 63 PAC. HIST. REV. 39 (1994).
Available at: UNM-DR
The Judicial Business of a Nineteenth Century Trial Court: The Northern District of California, 1851-1891, 5 W. LEGAL HIST. 217 (1992).
Available at: UNM-DR
Legislature Tampers with Recording Act, 20 N.M. L. REV. 235 (1990).
Available at: NMLR
More than 'Shreds and Patches': California's First Bill of Rights, 17 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 13 (1989).
Available at: UNM-DR
Judge Ogden Hoffman and the Northern District Court of California, 1 W. LEGAL HIST. 99 (1988).
Available at: UNM-DR
Politics and the Courts: The Struggle Over Land in San Francisco, 1846-1866, 26 SANTA CLARA L. REV. 127 (1986).
Available at: UNM-DR
Judicial Style in California's Federal Admiralty Court: Ogden Hoffman and the First Ten Years, 1851-1861, 64 S. CAL. Q. 125 (1982).
Available at: UNM-DR
An Entrenched Bill of Rights for the United Kingdom: The Constitutional Dilemma, 10 ANGLO-AM. L. REV. 105 (1981).
Available at: UNM-DR
Symposia
Balkinization Symposium on Christian G. Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance, June 14-26, 2023.
Available at: UNM-DR
Book Reviews
Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico by Malcolm Ebrights (1994), 93 WESTERN LEGAL HISTORY (1998).
Available at: UNM-DR
Rethinking the American Constitutional Tradition: National Dimensions in the Formulation of State Constitutions, 103 CAL. SUP. CT. HISTORICAL SOC'Y YEARBOOK 1 (1995).
Available at: UNM-DR
Briefs
Brief for American Association on Mental Retardation et al. as Amicus Curiae, Stripling v. Head, No. 03-1392 (Oct. 14, 2003) (certiorari granted) (co-counsel with Carol M. Suzuki, Norman Bay & Christian G. Fritz).
Available at: UNM-DR
Brief for American Association on Mental Retardation et al. as Amicus Curiae, Tennard v. Dretke, No. 02-10038 (Oct. 14, 2003) (consolidated for oral arguments with Smith v. Dretke, No. 02-11309) (certiorari granted) (co-counsel with Norman C. Bay, Michael B. Browde, Christian G. Fritz, April Land & Robert L. Schwartz).
Available at: UNM-DR
Brief for The American Association on Mental Retardation et al. as Amici Curiae, Ernest Paul McCarver v. State of North Carolina; The Supreme Court of North Carolina (2001) (No. 00-8727) (co-counsel with James Ellis, Michael B. Browde & Christian Fritz).
Available at: UNM-DR
Impact
A Nineteenth Century Habeas Corpus Mill: The Chinese Before the Federal Courts in California, 32 AM. J. LEGAL HIST. 347 (1988).
Reprinted: Asian Americans and the Law: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Charles McClain ed., 1998).
Popular Sovereignty, Vigilantism and the Constitutional Right of Revolution, 63 PAC. HIST. REV. 39 (1994).
Reprinted: The American West (Gordon Morris Bakken & Brenda Farrington eds., 2000).
Rethinking the American Constitutional Tradition: National Dimensions in the Formulation of State Constitutions, 103 CAL. SUP. CT. HISTORICAL SOC'Y YEARBOOK 1 (1995).
Reprinted: 26 RUTGERS L. J. 969 (1995).
Law School News
Professor Chris Fritz on the "Hot Seat" at Georgetown
December 16, 2014Professor Fritz Speaks at Teaching of History Conference
September 24, 2012Professor Chris Fritz Looks at Constitutional Issues in New Essays
February 27, 2012Professor Chris Fritz Elected to National Legal History Board
November 28, 2011Professor Chris Fritz Proposes New Approach to Constitutionalism
February 10, 2010Professor Chris Fritz Book Receives National Recognition
January 1, 2009Chris Fritz Explores Constitutionalism in New Book
November 8, 2007
