Baird Johnson

Baird Johnson is a first year PhD student focusing on early American history. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, he spent most of his time immersed in the 1780’s, pouring over the arguments which led to the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the subsequent ratification debates. He has published work about these and other topics in historical journals and online forums. His honors thesis, Perpetuating the Union: The Struggle for American Federalism, was awarded the David M. Kennedy Prize. In the PhD program, Baird intends to widen the scope of his research both temporally and geographically by reconstructing the “Critical Period” of United States history within a contemporary (1780s) global context and much older intellectual ones.

As a joint degree student in Stanford Law School, Baird was recently named a Kirkland & Ellis Scholar. His two courses of study have already begun to coalesce in his work on Melancton Smith’s unique role in the struggle to ratify the United States Constitution, for which he won the Stanford Center for Law and History Legal History Paper Prize. He eagerly anticipates further opportunities to integrate his work on law and history and believes there is no better place to do so.