Andrea McDowell is a professor of law at Seton Hall University Law School. Her main interest is legal history, particularly popular trials on the frontier. Her book on law in the California gold rush, We the Miners, appeared in 2022. She has since turned, first, to criminal law in the gold rushes of Colorado, Montana, and Nevada, and then to law in frontier settlements more generally - seeking to distinguish frontier criminal trials from mob killings (“lynchings”), on the one hand, and vigilantism, on the other. Before going to law school, Andrea McDowell was an Egyptologist, specializing in ancient Egyptian law and society. She taught Egyptology at Leiden and Johns Hopkins Universities.
