Professor Robert J. Cottrol is the Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and Professor of History and Sociology in the Columbian College at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1995. A specialist in American and Comparative Legal History, he also teaches criminal law. His scholarship has been cited by the United States Supreme Court and by the Third and Ninth Circuits, and has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, and Texas Law Review, among others. He is the author or editor of multiple acclaimed books in legal history and the co-author, with Brannon P. Denning, of To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment (University Press of Kansas, 2023), which won the 2025 Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize from the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.