Petitioning for Freedom: Lawfully Challenging Institutionalization

Date and Time

• Thursday, May 14, 2026  6:30pm - 7:30pm

Location

Details

In a second free evening lecture at the Nebraska History Museum, Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky returns on May 14 at 6:30 pm to explore a powerful and often overlooked topic in legal history: the use of habeas corpus petitions to challenge institutionalization. Her talk will focus on cases involving asylums and other sites of confinement. This program will examine how individuals and families used the courts to contest forced institutionalization. These petitions reveal the blurred lines between care and control, protection and punishment, and highlight how factors like gender, age, class, and social norms shaped who could be confined and why.

About Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky
Katrina Jagodinsky is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is author of the award-winning book, Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1945 from Yale University Press, and has recently launched an award-winning digital database called Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924 that links thousands of petitioners who resisted slavery, colonialism, coverture, deportation, institutionalization, and incarceration (petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu). She is also the founder of the Digital Legal Research Lab, which trains students in legal research using digital tools at UNL.