Will Holub-Moorman studies the legal, political, and social history of the modern United States. His dissertation project traces the relationship between the enforcement of parental responsibility and state-building since the 1960s. It examines how efforts to replace public provision with familial obligation pushed local and state governments to pilot more punitive social policy in search of cost-effectiveness. Drawing on previously unexamined municipal and state archives, the dissertation offers new insight into how a range of institutions—child support enforcement and child welfare agencies, welfare departments, family courts, district attorneys’ offices—became enmeshed within the fiscal dynamics of federalism in ways that persistently expanded and toughened their collaborative enforcement of family law.

His paper “Tough Love: Child Support Enforcement, Welfare Reform, and the US Administrative State, 1970-2000,” was awarded the 2024 Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Stanford Center for Law and History’s annual conference. He was also selected to present this research at the American Society for Legal History’s Student Research Colloquium and Legal History Colloquium, as well as Princeton’s Modern America Workshop. His public writing on family law and social policy has appeared in the Boston Review.

Will is currently pursuing a J.D. at Penn Carey Law, where he is an Associate Editor at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and a volunteer advocate manager at the Custody and Protection Project. Since 2021, he has been a Digital Fellow at the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

Will received his B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016. His senior thesis, which examined the interplay between psychological expertise and popular initiatives to reform American children’s experience of Hollywood cinema during the interwar period, was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. Before arriving at Princeton, Will spent several years working as a high school history teacher.