University of Georgia
School of Law
312 Hirsch Hall
Athens, GA 30602
United States
M.A., J.D., Ph.D., University of Virginia
B.S.P.H., B.A., University of North Carolina
American Legal History
The Law and Ethics of Lawyering
Corporations
Constitutional Law
Logan E. Sawyer III joined the University of Georgia School of Law in 2010 and was promoted to the rank of full professor and named a J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law in 2021. As the law school's director of undergraduate studies, he helped create and currently oversees the law school’s new undergraduate minor in Law, Jurisprudence, and the State.
He was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2014-15, 2016 and 2019. He has also been a Law Research Fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center and taught courses on American legal history at the University of Virginia. His academic interests focus on the relationship between law and political institutions in American history.
His current book project, Partisan Jurisprudence: A Political History of Originalism, 1942-1992, is under contract with Studies in Legal History at Cambridge University Press. His recent scholarship includes: “Originalism as Partisan Jurisprudence: The Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation inside the Reagan Administration” in the American Journal of Constitutional History (forthcoming 2025), “Originalism from the Soft Southern Strategy to the New Right” in 33 Journal of Policy History 32 (2020), “Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism” in 37 Law & History Review 847 (2019), "Principle and Politics in the New History of Originalism" in 57 American Journal of Legal History 198 (2017) and "Conservative Lawyers, the Other Rights Revolution, and the Remaking of American Conservatism" in 40 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 729 (2016).
Before he began teaching, Sawyer served at the White House as associate counsel for the Homeland Security Council and as a trial attorney at the Department of Justice Office of Consumer Litigation. He entered government service as part of DOJ’s Honors Program. He was a judicial clerk for Judge Jane R. Roth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and for Justice Robert F. Orr of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
He became a member of the UGA Teaching Academy in 2021.
Sawyer earned his B.S.P.H. in environmental science and his B.A. in history from the University of North Carolina. He earned his J.D. and Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia.
ARTICLES
Originalism from the Soft Southern Strategy to the New Right: The Constitutional Politics of Sam Ervin Jr, 33 J. Pol'y Hist. 32 (2021).
Reform Prosecutors and Separation of Powers, 72 Okla. L. Rev. 603 (2020).
Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism, 37 Law & Hist. Rev. 847 (2019).
Principle and Politics In the New History of Originalism, 57 Am. J. Legal Hist. 198 (2017).
The Return of Constitutional Federalism, 91 U. Den. L. R. 221 (2014).
Legal History in Context, 53 Am. J. Legal Hist. 397 (2013).
Constitutional Principle, Partisan Calculation and the Beveridge Child Labor Bill, 31 Law & Hist. Rev. 325 (2013).
Creating Hammer v. Dagengart, 21 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 67 (2012).
Grazing, Grimaud, and Gifford Pinchot: How the Forest Service Overcame the Classical Nondelegation Doctrine to Establish Administrative Crimes, 24 J.L. & Pol. 169 (2008).
Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence and Legal Change: Sociological Jurisprudence and the Road to International Shoe, 10 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 59 (2001).
CHAPTERS
"Revising Constitutional History" in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (C. Nichols and N. Unger eds.) (Wiley, 2017).
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism by K.I. Kersch, 38 L.& Hist. Rev. 512 (2020).
Why the Right Embraced Rights, 40 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 729 (2016) (reviewing Jefferson Decker, The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government (2016)).
Book Review, Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida by James M. Denham, 82 J. S. Hist. 4 (2016).
Book Review, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940, by Nicholas R. Parrillo, 74 J. Econ. Hist. 630 (2014).