Anthony Gregory

About

Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His historical work examines political, legal, and ideological development of state power, in both its liberatory and coercive dimensions, and in particular the ways law enforcement and security policy interact with liberalism and constitutional federalism. He is the author of three books, most recently New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State (Harvard University Press, 2024).

The book reassesses the political importance of the 1930s by highlighting the problem of lawlessness, arguing that the Roosevelt administration’s criminal justice policies transformed liberalism and the constitutional order. They also helped legitimate government itself, transcending the institutional, jurisdictional, partisan, racial, and social divisions that had previously frustrated national enforcement authority.

Gregory’s previous books are American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016) and The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013). His writing has appeared in Law and History Review, the Journal of the Early Republic, and other popular outlets.

Currently he is researching how post–World War II theorists across the political spectrum prioritized fixed principles, hoping to isolate their systems of thought from the contingencies of history. He hypothesizes that modern ideologies are more historicist than their champions suggest and hopes to shed light on twenty-first-century political fractures and realignments as the consequence of narrative incoherence more than disagreement over timeless values.

Gregory earned his history BA, MA, and PhD at the University of California–Berkeley, and has been a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project and an assistant professor in residence at Rhode Island School of Design. Before attending graduate school, Gregory was a research fellow at the Independent Institute.