Donor Spotlight: Herbert A. Johnson

Herbert A. Johnson, legal historian and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of South Carolina, has been a steadfast supporter of ACLS since 1999. Active in the leadership of the American Society for Legal History in the 1970s, Johnson was privileged to attend annual ACLS meetings for the executive secretaries of learned societies and to serve as the ASLH’s delegate to the ACLS.  This broadened his appreciation of the ACLS’s formative role as a coordinator of, and advocate for, humanistic learning, and its centrality in working for the expansion and enhancement of scholarship at both at the interdisciplinary and the international levels. As a recipient of an ACLS Fellowship in 1974-75 to support his work on the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson can’t emphasize enough the difference his fellowship made to the trajectory of his career. He has given to ACLS so consistently because he believes that contributions like his “are the lifeblood” of an organization that supports critically important scholarship.