Arielle Gorin
From the chaotic constitutional flux of the Reconstruction era to the rehabilitation policies and practices of 20th-century Idaho prisons, my research interests focus on ordinary Americans and their relationship with the law. How do people grapple with -- and effect -- legal change? How do they view their relationship with the law, in everyday situations and under extraordinary circumstances (including the legal and institutional vacuums brought on by wartime destruction or frontier exploration)? These themes fascinate me, and I hope to mine them thoroughly during my time at Yale. Though my research goals may seem broad -- and to some extent, I confess, they are -- they generally fall under the rubric of post-Civil War U.S. legal history. Fields that also compel me, and overlap with my legal interests, include the history of the American West -- especially the Pacific northwest -- and the history of the media, especially newspapers.
I received my bachelor's degree from Princeton, where my senior thesis detailed the evolution of inmate journalism at the Idaho State Penitentiary from 1939 to 1976. At Princeton, I served as managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, and my passion for journalism -- and admiration for journalists -- persists. I see these interests as closely connected to my work in history, rather than separate hobbies: After all, historians are, in a sense, just journalists whose sources happen to be dead.
