Justin Simard was recognized this spring with Michigan State University’s prestigious All-University Teacher-Scholar Award. He is the third College of Law faculty member to receive this award.
Since joining MSU Law in 2020, Simard has built a national reputation as an innovative legal historian while earning exceptional praise from students and colleagues alike. He was recently named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. And last year, he received the MSU Law Campbell Teaching Award, the college’s highest honor for classroom instruction.
“Justin embodies what the Teacher-Scholar Award is meant to recognize,” said Dean Michael Sant’Ambrogio. “He is a deeply thoughtful teacher, a groundbreaking scholar and an engaged leader in our academic community.”
Simard is the founder of the Citing Slavery Project, a digital initiative that has reshaped how the legal profession understands the legacy of slavery in American law. Working with students, he identified more than 14,000 cases involving enslaved people and built a public database tracing the influence of those cases on modern courts.
His work has appeared in leading journals including the Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, Law and History Review and the Journal of Southern History, and has been featured by The Washington Post, NPR and the Associated Press.
The project contributed to a new rule in The Bluebook, guiding how cases involving enslaved people are cited, and has sparked broader conversations about transparency and historical accountability in the law.
For Simard, teaching and research are inseparable—and often collaborative. His courses frequently serve as incubators for new scholarship, with students contributing directly to research projects and co-authoring articles.
“Teaching at the law college is a real pleasure, and I have learned so much from my students,” Simard said. “I am honored to be recognized for the work we have done together.”
In one project, he and alumna, T.B.Hall, ’23, examined how repossession law operates in practice, leading to a broader study of how Black consumers experience commercial law. The resulting paper, titled Playing a Rigged Game: Black Consumers and the Sophisticated Skeptism of Contract Law, has been presented at conferences and is under review at various law journals.
In another, Simard and alum John Forrest, ‘25, are developing a project titled Mapping the Canon, which examines the cases that appear most frequently in law school casebooks across the country. The project aims to better understand how legal education constructs its foundational narratives—and to give students greater insight into why certain cases are taught.
Simard served last year as director of the MSU Law’s Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession. There, he expanded programming that connects students with judges, practitioners and business leaders to explore professional responsibility and ethical leadership.
He has also strengthened partnerships across campus, including with the MSU Ethics Institute, and extended his work nationally through presentations and educational materials developed with students.
The All-University Teacher-Scholar Award recognizes his teaching, research and leadership accomplishments.
[The following published articles were written by Simard and his students:
Audrea Dakho, Morgan Henry Ilina Krishen, and Justin Simard, Citing Slavery Project, 1 Journal for Digital legal History 1, https://doi.org/10.21825/dlh.89670 (2023)
Anna Maxwell & Justin Simard, Slavery’s Legacy in Michigan Law, Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society, micourthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Citing-Slavery-Special-Issue.pdf (Feb. 2025)
Nina Jeffries, Anna Maxwell, & Justin Simard, Enslavement and the Appellate Courts: A Dataset of Northern and Free State Legal Decisions from 1784 to 1875, 6 J. of Slavery and Data Preservation 246 (Dec. 2025)]