AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association extends a warm congratulations to the 15 winners of its 2026 Annual Awards.

LSA honors leading international scholars each summer for their groundbreaking publications and contributions to the study of law and society. To view more information about each of the winners, check out our Awards Page.

Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize

WINNER: Joseph Sanders

The Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Award “is given in recognition of a body of scholarly work,” to honor “empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.” Joe Sanders is the A.A. White Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law School. He has worked at the intersection of law and social science for half a century. He has been actively involved in the Law & Society Association, serving as Editor of the Law & Society Review, as well as Book Review Editor. He has been a leading scholar in both the legal academic and law and social science worlds. He has coauthored several casebooks that exemplify conventional legal scholarship on evidence and torts. More important for the Kalven prize is his landmark work in law and social science, which ranges from pure sociology and social psychology to deep sociolegal research. With Richard Lempert he published a theoretically insightful Introduction to Law and Social Science (1986). His qualitative research takes an empirical dive into the cases, arguments, evidentiary and other issues arising in mass tort litigation. His work in this area focused on the Bendectin birth defect litigation that played a dominant role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s attempt to guide courts in handling scientific evidence. His close look at the Bendectin lawsuits resulted in several articles on that case and related topics, including the definitive book, Bendectin on Trial: A Study of Mass Tort Litigation (1998). Joe built on what he took from his Bendectin investigation to produce a series of articles on the role that science and expert evidence plays or should play in litigation. This stream of work led to coauthorship of important volumes directed largely at lawyers and judges, Modern Scientific Evidence (several editions from 1997 through 2018). Along with Lee Hamilton, he undertook an ambitious cross-cultural investigation of how citizens determine legal responsibility for wrongdoing. The project administered surveys in Russia, Japan, and the United States, a daunting task. It resulted in numerous articles and a book comparing Japan and the United States, Everyday Justice: Responsibility and the Individual in Japan and the United States (1992). For these many accomplishments, Joe Sanders deserves recognition with the Kalven Prize.

International Prize

WINNER: Dee Smythe

Professor Dee Smythe is one of the leading sociolegal scholars working in and on Africa today. Her scholarship exemplifies the intellectual rigor, interdisciplinary depth, and international engagement that the Law and Society Association International Prize seeks to recognize. Across more than two decades of scholarship, institutional leadership, and public engagement, Professor Smythe has made transformative contributions to the study of law, gender, violence, criminal justice, and social transformation in postcolonial and transitional societies.

Professor Smythe’s work has fundamentally shaped sociolegal understandings of state responses to gender-based violence, particularly in South Africa. Her scholarship consistently bridges empirical rigor with theoretical innovation, combining ethnographic, institutional, and doctrinal analysis to illuminate how law operates in contexts marked by inequality, colonial legacies, and social transition. Whether examining policing, rape law reform, customary law, access to justice, or the everyday functioning of criminal courts, her research demonstrates how legal systems simultaneously reproduce and contest social hierarchies and exclusion.

Her major publications include Rape Unresolved: Policing Sexual Offenses in South Africa; Should We Consent? The politics of rape law reform in South Africa (ed. with Lillian Artz) and the Sexual Offenses Commentary (ed. with Bronwyn Pithey), have become foundational contributions to sociolegal scholarship. Through these works, Professor Smythe has advanced critical conversations about legal reform, victimization, legal consciousness, and institutional power, while helping establish law and society scholarship in Africa as a vibrant and globally significant intellectual field.

Professor Smythe’s scholarship has systematically engaged with policy, advocacy, and institution-building. Her research has informed legal reform initiatives, parliamentary submissions, judicial training programs, and public policy debates concerning sexual offenses, domestic violence, rural governance, and human rights. Her scholarship exemplifies a deeply engaged sociolegal tradition in which academic inquiry is inseparable from broader struggles for social justice and democratic transformation.

Professor Smythe has also played a central role in expanding the international reach of the law and society community. At the University of Cape Town, she served as Founding Director of the Centre for Law & Society, Director of the Law, Race and Gender Unit, and Deputy Dean for Research, mentoring generations of sociolegal scholars and helping institutionalize interdisciplinary law and society research across the African continent. Internationally, she has been a major force within the Law and Society Association, serving as the Association’s inaugural International Coordinator of Global Activities, co-chairing the 2022 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, and contributing extensively to the development of global scholarly networks and collaborative research initiatives. She has likewise played an important leadership role within the Research Committee on Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association, where she currently serves as Vice President for Internationalization, and on the Governing Board/Patronato of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law.

Professor Smythe’s career reflects a profound commitment to the internationalization of sociolegal scholarship and to building intellectual spaces that center Global South perspectives and experiences. Her work continues to shape debates across law and society, sociolegal studies, criminology, feminist legal studies, and African studies, making her one of the most influential and internationally respected scholars in the field today.

Herbert Jacob Book Prize

WINNER: Joshua Page and Joe Soss, Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice

Legal Plunder is a significant contribution to socio-legal scholarship because it provides a rigorous, multi-layered analysis of how the American criminal justice system has evolved from a mechanism of public safety into one of financial extraction. The book’s central achievement lies in its development of the concept of “legal plunder”—the idea that legally sanctioned fines, fees, bail requirements, and privatized supervision programs systematically strip resources from vulnerable populations under the guise of legitimate governmental authority. By naming and theorizing this phenomenon, the authors give scholars and reformers a powerful conceptual framework for understanding how law itself can become an instrument of exploitation. The book excels in its depth of research and historical grounding that show how structural forces—not merely individual bad actors—produced a system in which punishment generates revenue for both public institutions and private companies. Its most important contribution to socio-legal scholarship is its intersectional analysis of how predatory criminal justice practices compound race, class, and gender inequality. Legal Plunder is a comprehensive and essential account of how American criminal justice – modern and historical – serves as a linchpin of American inequality. It is a truly outstanding achievement.

Honorable Mention: Bernadette Atuahene, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America 

Plundered makes a compelling and original contribution to socio-legal scholarship by reframing Detroit’s property tax foreclosure crisis not as a story of individual financial failure, but as a product of systemic, government-driven wealth extraction from Black communities. At its core, the book introduces the concept of “predatory governance,” defined as a system in which local governments raise public revenue through policies that intentionally or unintentionally target marginalized communities. This framework is a significant theoretical contribution, giving scholars and policymakers a vocabulary to describe how seemingly neutral administrative processes can produce deeply unequal outcomes. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its interdisciplinary methodology that combines legal doctrine, statistical analysis, historical contextualization, and deeply personal interviews with affected homeowners. Atuahene’s rigorous interview methodology ensures both ethical integrity and scholarly credibility. In sum, Plundered offers a powerful, well-documented model for how socio-legal research can bridge the gap between academic analysis and accessible public narrative.

James Willard Hurst Book Prize

WINNER: Serena Mayeri, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law

Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege shows how, beginning in the 1960s, marriage was dislodged from its supreme position across a range of legal domains and replaced with a regime of “marital privilege.” With poignant, empathetic detail drawn from archives and legal documents, Mayeri brings to life both well-known and not-so-famous cases, revealing the theories and evolving strategies animating a wide range of challengers to the regime of marital supremacy—from litigants to advocacy organizations to legal academics. Yet, even as their victories advanced the values of nondiscrimination and individual autonomy, Mayeri shows how the assumptions of the new regime of “marital privilege” obscured and deepened inequalities of wealth, power, and privilege in American law and society. Combining sweeping ambition, doctrinal acumen, and a keen sense of historical contingency, Marital Privilege provides a magisterial account of a crucial transformation of American law.

Law and Society Association Article Prize

WINNER: Gillian Slee, “Home but not free: Rule-breaking, withdrawal, and dignity in reentry”

Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic field work with people under community supervision in Philadelphia, Gillian Slee’s article, “Home but not free: Rule-breaking, withdrawal, and dignity in reentry,” documents and analyzes the mismatch between the asserted rehabilitative aims of state supervision of reentry and the experiences of formerly incarcerated people. This is an ambitious empirical study of how the breakdown of personal dignity contributes to people’s violations of parole conditions and withdrawal from supportive services. Describing people’s frustrating efforts to use the state housing assistance program, for example, Slee reveals that the program is unresponsive to people’s financial and emotional constraints. Slee theorizes that this “unrecognized vulnerability,” a concept she develops across multiple examples, leads people to withdraw from the much-needed assistance. Moreover, Slee shows, the substantial discretion of program administrators, along with the manifold and byzantine rules, amount to threats to participants’ dignity and severe limits on their participation in social and kin networks, which leads to rule-breaking, resignation, resistance, and withdrawal. The paper concludes with several concrete suggestions for institutional redesign to empower more humane and effective systems. This article is empirically rich, theoretically significant, and highly readable.

John Hope Franklin Prize

WINNER: Alice Abrokwa, “Too Stubborn to Care for: The Impacts of Discrimination on Patient Noncompliance”

Patient noncompliance is an enduring problem in clinical medicine, and researchers have documented both its prevalence as well as the disproportionate application of this label to racial minorities. Being characterized as noncompliant can have significant impacts on patients’ continued access to health care, which can further aggravate racial disparities in health. As Abrokwa notes, “the perception of noncompliance, as well as a patient’s actual noncompliance, becomes reason to not treat Black people’s pain seriously or at all.” (466) In Too Stubborn to Care For: The Impacts of Discrimination on Patient Noncompliance, Professor Abrokwa offers a brilliant intervention that highlights how patient noncompliance is often produced by medical providers rather than just the way some patients are. By drawing upon frameworks from disability rights to critical race theory, she develops a new approach that moves medicine away from treating compliance as an individual choice and towards an understanding that sees it as an interaction between patients, institutions, and practitioners. This creates new opportunities for reducing disparities and making health care more accessible.

Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize

WINNER: Dr. Shruti Iyer, “Silicosis and the State: Valuing Life and Labour in Contemporary India”

The dissertation examines how silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to silica dust, has become a site of political struggle involving workers, activists, and the state. Building on uniquely rich ethnographic work in Rajasthan, India, this research shows that, while the state designed silicosis compensation primarily as a humanitarian response to suffering—translating injury into monetary compensation through bureaucratic procedures, workers and activists reinterpret and mobilize these programs for broader political ends. The study shows that welfare institutions function not only as mechanisms of bureaucratic governance, but also as arenas where political claims, solidarities, and reinterpretations of state responsibility emerge.

The committee uniformly noted that this dissertation presented a vivid, engaging, and beautiful ethnography of a case and setting that were both unique and carefully connected to broader contexts and theories across a surprising breadth of disciplines and subject areas. The committee appreciated the dissertation’s intensive and rigorous methods, including both a detailed analysis of the legal development of the Indian government’s policy establishing a silicosis welfare scheme, as well as an intensive observation of the implementation of this policy on the ground, as negotiated by laborers, patients, doctors, and unions. In particular, we appreciated not only the author’s interdisciplinary engagement with literature from tort and labor law to medicine and public health to theories of welfare state action, but also their engagement with how differently-situated individuals make moral and political meaning of the law. Throughout, the author centered the agency of unexpected actors from factory laborers to terminally ill patients and their families. Not only does this dissertation analyze an impressive scale of empirical data, and interweave interdisciplinary perspectives on law, but the author also engages thoughtfully and transparently with their own challenges – from an initial interest in tort law that shifted with the investigation of the silicosis welfare policies to the class contrasts (and associated ethical dilemmas) inherent in being an elite urban researcher in rural working class settings.

In sum, by tracing silicosis across bureaucratic procedures, legal claims, and activist campaigns, this work shows how welfare programs can simultaneously individualize suffering and enable collective political mobilization.

Honorable Mention: Meghan Maree Ballard, “Language Access in State Courts: The Bureaucratic Interpretation, Organizational Construction, and Local Implementation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964″

Although Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits national origin discrimination, it does not explicitly address language. Courts and agencies have nevertheless interpreted it to encompass language discrimination, creating a framework for language access. In practice, however, implementation remains uneven: many courts limit or inconsistently provide interpretation services. Ballard’s dissertation investigates how ambiguity in the administrative enforcement of civil rights law creates space for variation in how institutions interpret and implement these obligations, resulting in unequal access to justice for individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP). This methodologically ambitious dissertation traces the interpretation of “meaningful language access” across federal interpretation, state organizational construction, and local implementation. By tracing this policy-to-practice pathway of language access, Ballard reveals how language rights are constructed through interactions among federal agencies, courts, and local actors. The dissertation’s crisply written prose and rigorous approach help to showcase both how important language access is and the myriad social forces that undermine its provision. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that, while language access is central to dignity and equality, it often settles into what Ballard terms “good enough” implementation.

By linking the study of immigration, civil rights enforcement, and court administration, the dissertation offers a significant contribution to law and society scholarship. It reveals how civil rights law travels across institutional levels and gets reshaped in practice. 

Honorable Mention: Ed Cornelius, “Car Wash Legacies: Lawyers, Globalization, and the Restructuring of the Brazilian Penal Field”

This impressive work draws on Bourdieusian theory to analyze the key roles of lawyers and law in penal change within Brazil’s anti-corruption campaign, known as “Operation Car Wash.” Drawing on extensive qualitative research, the dissertation examines how the legal legacy of this anticorruption investigation, which initially targeted powerful political and business elites, ultimately produced penal reforms that disproportionately affected marginalized defendants, rather than elites. Cornelius’s dissertation argues that this outcome should not be reduced to explanations about partisan politics. Instead, Cornelius’s dissertation suggests that prosecutors and judges sought to “democratize punishment” by importing punitive models from the Global North, but encountered resistance from elite defense lawyers and scholars advocating for a minimalist criminal law grounded in procedural safeguards. The analysis is based on more than a year of fieldwork carried out in Brazil in two different cities (Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo), as well as 116 interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys, public defenders, professors, and state and federal justices; observations of 27 academic and other events; and a collection of speeches, hearings, legislation, and other documents related to legal reforms. This extensive material enables Cornelius to analyze two legal reforms: “Ten Measures Against Corruption” (2016) and an anti-crime package passed in 2019 and document how penal change emerges from struggles within the legal profession over competing legal ideas, rather than exclusively from legislative incentives. 

Cornelius impressively sketched out major developments within Brazilian legal culture, smartly and effectively contextualizing nation-level processes of penal change within larger processes of the globalization of law. Marked by a confident voice and analytical sharpness, the dissertation is highly polished and unusually cohesive in its development. The resulting text reads much more like a finished book than a dissertation. By bridging the sociology of punishment and law and society scholarship, it offers a clear and original account of how legal actors and expertise shape penal reform.

Law and Society Graduate Student Paper Prize

WINNER: Juhwan Seo, “Not the ‘Love Police’? How Lawyers Shape Immigrant Families”

Juhwan Seo has been selected as the winner of this year’s graduate student paper award. Seo’s well-written, thoughtfully developed, and timely paper examines the role of attorneys who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates, Seo observes the ways that legal professionals shape intimate dimensions of couples’ everyday lives so that they may be seen as “respectable” by the state. Attorneys translate immigration law into personalized checklists that serve as a kind of blueprint for marriage that couples must follow. Legal professionals instruct and correct family behaviors, they ensure they are routinized and documented–all to ensure that mixed-status couples conform to White, heteronormative, middle-class nuclear family norms. Seo expands on theories of social control, nonstate governance and lawyering to document the critical role that legal professionals play in coercing subjects toward American acculturation.

Law and Society Association Undergraduate Student Paper Prize

WINNER: Levi Garrett Cannon, “Defining Custody Resolution: How Parent Coordinators Construct Family Law”

Levi Garrett Cannon has been selected as the winner of this year’s undergraduate paper prize.  Cannon’s impressive paper explores how parent coordination has emerged over the last four decades as an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) forum for high-conflict custody cases. Based on interviews with parent coordinators in a California county, the author deftly demonstrates how practitioners translate California family law into practice, in a context of vague standards and guidelines that vary across counties. In detailed fashion, Cannon examines the ways that coordinators exercise their considerable discretion, and the way that discretion is shaped by extra-legal factors such as contested psychological scholarship, the positions of professional organizations, and the teachings of popular parent coordination trainings. The result, they provocatively argue, is the potential erosion of the rights of both parents and children.

Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award

WINNER: Susan Bibler Coutin

We wholeheartedly endorse Prof. Coutin’s receipt of the 2026 Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award, and we offer this description culled from five detailed nomination letters (from four former doctoral students, now professors, and from one colleague, who described her mentorship of students in the Criminology, Law, and Society Department).

Prof. Coutin’s considerable strengths as mentor shine through in these letters. One nominator offered that “Susan provided unwavering guidance and support, encouraging me to pursue ambitious research goals while fostering my intellectual independence,” and this person described working as a research assistant to Coutin as well as co-authoring two articles and two chapters with her over the course of eight years. Another nominator wrote: “If you ask anyone who has been mentored by Susan, particularly her doctoral students, what she is like as a mentor, you will hear themes of encouragement, innovation, dedication, and creativity.” Another former student described Coutin’s mentoring style as including “stellar communication, ability to handle difficult situations, and clear commitment to student success.”

Multiple professors spoke about Prof. Coutin’s guidance during especially difficult points in their careers as Ph.D. students. One wrote, “Whether [it] be exploring new project ideas, providing critical feedback on writing, or pushing me to think through tough theoretical questions regarding the contribution and implications of my dissertation, she was supportive all the way. Whenever I raised concerns [about] my progress, Dr. Coutin…found ways to showcase my talents—whether that [was] sitting in on my lectures so that she could speak to my teaching abilities, recommending me for funding opportunities, or connecting me with colleagues based on research interests.” A different nominator described Coutin’s “compassionate” support when, during graduate school, her mother entered hospice care and then Coutin’s crucial role two years later at the dissertation writing stage: “Dr. Coutin recognized the severity of my writer’s block and offered various strategies to help me overcome it…[including] pretending I was talking to a loved one and explaining my dissertation. I imagined explaining the project to my mother, who was the inspiration for my dissertation and who had passed away…This technique was what finally got me writing again, and it was a critical turning point in my academic journey…”

Multiple letters wrote of structures Coutin formed to collectively support her graduate students (and foster their support of each other), including her creation in 2014 of the UC Irvine Law and Ethnography Lab, which Coutin herself has described (according to a letter) as a way to build an inter-disciplinary community of ethnographers. Coutin led bi-weekly meetings to provide support and to troubleshoot during students’ fieldwork, and within four years the group had grown from six to 20 graduate students, attracting overwhelmingly “female, BIPOC, and LGTBQ graduate students—a testament to the ‘safe space’ that Susan has cultivated.” Participants in the Lab, along with Coutin and another faculty co-leader, described its impact in a roundtable session at the 2021 LSA Annual Meeting. And in 2024 Coutin and others published an anthology to which 12 former lab participants contributed chapters, thus becoming a permanent testament to “Susan’s generous, thoughtful, and selfless mentorship.”

In conclusion, we are honored and delighted to unequivocally recommend the 2026 LSA Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award go to Professor Susan Bibler Coutin.

Ronald Pipkin Service Award

WINNER: Laura Beth Nielsen

LSA is honored to present the 2026 Ronald Pipkin Service Award to Professor Laura Beth Nielsen. Laura Beth is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.

For over 25 years, Laura Beth has been a dynamic presence and committed leader within the Law and Society Association. She has served the Association with distinction as President (2021-23), Secretary (2011-13) and Trustee (2001-04). She has also chaired or co-chaired numerous committees, including multiple prize committees, the Program Committee (2004), Graduate Student Workshop (2010 and 2013) and this year’s Governance Committee.

Beyond her executive and committee service, Laura Beth has been integral to launching several critical LSA initiatives. Through her vision and extensive efforts, LSA established its endowment, substantially enhancing the Association’s ability to support sociolegal programming through the LSA Advance Grant. She was also instrumental in securing external grant funding for and managing the ABF/LSA Doctoral Fellowship in Law and Inequality.

Finally, one of her most significant contributions has been her steadfast mentoring of a generation of Law and Society scholars, for which she was recognized with the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Prize in 2018. Much like Ronald Pipkin himself, perhaps her greatest contribution has been her willingness to step in whenever and wherever she has been needed to ensure the continuing success of the Association. In this domain, no task has been too small or quirky (see, e.g., leading the flashmob for the LSA 50th Anniversary celebration at the 2014 meeting in Minneapolis).

Through her formal efforts within the Association and informal role as one of LSA’s greatest ambassadors, Laura Beth has been a shining example of dedicated service that has created a tremendously positive impact on the Association.

LSA kicks off its 2026 Annual Meeting on Thursday, May 28. Visit this year’s conference website to learn more.

2026 LSA AWARDS

Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize
Joseph Sanders | University of Houston

International Prize
Dee Smythe | University of Cape Town

Herbert Jacob Book Prize
Joshua Page & Joe Soss | University of Minnesota

Honorable Mention – Bernadette Atuahene | University of Southern California School of Law

James Willard Hurst Book Prize
Serena Mayeri | University of Pennsylvania Law School

Law and Society Association Article Prize
Gillian Slee | University of Georgia

John Hope Franklin Prize
Alice Abrokwa | University of Virginia School of Law

Dissertation Prize
Dr. Shruti Iyer | University of Cambridge

Honorable Mention – Meghan Maree Ballard | RAND Corporation

Honorable Mention – Ed Cornelius | University of Minnesota

Graduate Student Paper Prize
Juhwan Seo | Rutgers University

Undergraduate Student Paper Prize
Levi Garrett Cannon | University of California, Berkeley

Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award
Susan Bibler Coutin | University of California, Irvine

Ronald Pipkin Service Award
Laura Beth Nielsen| Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association extends a warm congratulations to the 20 winners of its 2025 Annual Awards.

LSA honors leading international scholars each summer for their groundbreaking publications and contributions to the study of law and society. To view more information about each of the winners, check out our Awards Page.

James Willard Hurst Book Prize

WINNER: Allison Powers, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law

 Allison Power’s book Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law is a tour de force, drawing extensively on archival research to provide a richly textured account of the United States’ role in transforming international law.  The book’s impressive nuance and rigorous historical detail traces how the United States has wielded authority not only to shape outcomes in international disputes through formal law and the use of international tribunals, but also at local economic levels such as Cuban sugar plantations, the locks and stops of the Panama Canal, the Texas cotton fields, and Arizona copper mines. 

The book is an excellent achievement that never loses sight of the consequences of the U.S. government’s political and economic influence in international law, disputes, and economic violence.   It is a work that thoughtfully narrates how “ordinary people” from throughout the world have attempted to use international law to advance the search for justice.  The manuscript is compellingly written, and thoroughly researched.  It resituates how American law and power have been framed during the past two centuries and the communities rendered invisible.  It is an excellent contribution to law and society scholarship.

Herbert Jacob Book Prize

WINNER: Liz Chiarello, Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis

Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis examines how healthcare and policing intersect on the frontlines of the opioid crisis across the United States. Importantly, Professor Chiarello adds the perspectives of pharmacists to the ongoing conversation about the opioid crisis, and she focuses on prescription drug monitoring programs as a surveillance mechanism that connects healthcare and law enforcement professionals. She succinctly exposes deeply rooted and broader issues within the American (criminal) legal system that tries to solve social issues through law enforcement. Analyzing over 300 interviews spanning eight states and more than three professions, Chiarello points out the harms of allowing technology to blur the lines between law enforcement and healthcare and critiques the current policy focus on treatment as being too narrow and too late. Ultimately, her work suggests that the solution lies in a broad and comprehensive approach to policy and practice.

Law and Society Association Article Prize

WINNER: Mirian G. Martinez-Aranda, “Precarious Legal Patchworking: Detained Immigrants’ Access to Justice”

Published in Social Problems, this paper draws on extensive interview research with over 50 formerly detained undocumented immigrants to tell rich and detailed stories about the obstacles they faced in accessing justice while in detention, and the innovation they showed by cobbling together what legal resources they could. Martinez-Aranda calls this strategy “precarious legal patchworking (PLP),” extending existing research on immigrant survival strategies into carceral contexts. While this patchworking is an important expression of agency and makes a difference in some cases, its results are uneven and unreliable. This methodologically rigorous paper speaks directly to one of our era’s most defining questions of in/justice, painting a finely textured picture of the ways Martinez-Aranda’s research participants experienced detention and fought against it. Its theoretical contribution of PLP is fully realized and expansive, immediately usable by researchers working in other subfields and empirical contexts. This is exactly the kind of outcome the Article Prize hopes to inspire.

Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize

WINNER: Du Fei, “Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India”

Du Fei’s dissertation, “Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India,” challenges gendered constructions of Islamic law and reveals how gender-insensitive narratives have shaped dominant histories of trade and travel in global Islam.While Muslim women in transregional India are often portrayed as passive or economically marginalized, Fei shows that some acted as strategic negotiators—engaging with jurists, judges, and male kin to assert claims through Islamic law on property and inheritance. Rather than being confined to the private sphere, these women regularly negotiated with male kin, jurists, judges, and officials in multiple courts. Taking readers across the lands and seas of South Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, Fei effectively constructs a new archive for the legal history of South Asia, drawing on sources in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch. 

By positioning the household as a critical site of economic activity, the dissertation also unsettles simplistic accounts of patriarchy and offers a major methodological and substantive contribution to the economic and legal history of global early modernity. It advances scholarship on legal pluralism by demonstrating how women navigated overlapping legal traditions as they engaged in debates among Muslim jurists, colonial officials, and Orientalists. In short, Fei’s dissertation represents the epitome of law and society scholarship.

John Hope Franklin Prize

CO-WINNER: Jasmine E. Harris, “The Political Economy of Conservatorship”

Jasmine E. Harris’s “The Political Economy of Conservatorship,” published in the UCLA Law Review, reinterprets conservatorship as a tool of racial and economic subordination. Harris weaves legal history, disability theory, and racial critique into an incisive analysis of how disability law has been used to extract labor and property from Black and Indigenous communities. By connecting conservatorship’s historical deployment to its contemporary operation, Harris exposes the system’s deep-seated structural harm. Her article exemplifies socio-legal scholarship at its finest and proposes an abolitionist framework with broad implications for race, disability, and legal reform.

CO-WINNER: Daniel S. Harawa, “Coloring in the Fourth Amendment”

Daniel Harawa’s “Coloring in the Fourth Amendment,” published in the Harvard Law Review, delivers a powerful and incisive challenge to the colorblind assumptions embedded in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. By exposing how race-neutral legal standards mask racial subordination in policing, Harawa articulates a doctrinal and normative argument for a race-conscious reasonable person standard. Grounded in constitutional theory and racial justice advocacy, this article exemplifies rigorous scholarship and has the potential to reshape legal understandings of policing, seizures, and race.

Law and Society Graduate Student Paper Prize

CO-WINNER: Iolanthe Brooks, “Shuffling Within the System: The Pervasive Uncertainty of Prison Transfers”

Iolanthe Brooks’ terrific paper explores how carceral state institutions utilize movement as a form of punishment for incarcerated individuals. Brooks labels this novel concept “within-system shuffling,” wherein state carceral institutions transfer inmates to discipline and undermine those individuals that administrators feel cause trouble. Through a vibrant and breathtaking qualitative journey, Brooks’ work brings this concept to life. Ultimately, Brooks finds that within the system, shuffling is a tool that helps reinforce uncertainty and power for incarcerated individuals. This turns out to be the real gem of the paper, as it forces us to think about how movement itself can be viewed as an extension of governing power and compels us to consider how that power can be felt both individually and collectively. 

CO-WINNER: Roberta S. Pamplona, “Reframing Feminist Ideas, Challenging State Incorporation: Activism Against Violence and the Feminicidio Law in Brazil”

RobertaPamplona delivers an outstanding entry that examines what happens when the state co-opts feminist ideals into the criminal code. While it may be tempting to think that state co-optation would automatically lead to negative consequences, Pamplona’s work uses the Brazilian context to show that reality is much more complicated. In particular, Pamplona demonstrates how feminists’ continual advocacy and activism have helped to extend the “co-opted” concept “feminicídio” beyond the ideals supported by the state. In doing so, this work is a bright spot in a political landscape where people are constantly searching for answers and seeking hope on how to move forward. The brilliance of Pamplona’s work is that it illuminates two pathways forward: one in which organizers and activists allow the state to restrict and co-opt their concepts, and another in which activism can help expand and change state incorporation.  The choice is, of course, ours. 

Law and Society Association Undergraduate Student Paper Prize

CO-WINNER: Avani Singh, “Judicial Insights: Unraveling Mental Health Decisions in Collaborative vs. Traditional Courts”

Avani Singh’s dynamic paper is a comparative analysis that explores how judges in traditional courts and mental health courts understand their work. Conducting an array of impressive interviews, Singh finds that judges’ problem-solving models impact their perception of effectiveness in the court system. Particularly, Singh finds that the medical model is increasingly perceived as more effective in handling mental health issues, but effective judicial training on the use of the medical model still lags behind. Ultimately, Singh’s work forces us to grapple with why criminal courts and law are seen as the best venue to deal with mental illness and pushes us to think more deeply about the relationship between power, law, violence, and mental illness. 

CO-WINNER: Celia Parry, “Strange Bedfellows: Guardians for Fetuses and Future Generations”

Celia Parry’s impressive paper explores the use of legal guardianship in anti-abortion cases to show how climate activists can learn from and adopt similar logics. Building on this, Parry identifies three key lessons climate litigators can adopt from the fetal guardianship context: 1) flexible civil procedure codes and constructive processes can lead to success, 2) below-the-radar advocacy is preferential, and 3) the reopening of debates around legal personhood in light of Dobbs. Keen to point out flaws, Parry notes that one potential drawback of their approach is that this strategy risks entrenching legal guardianship in the anti-abortion context, which would be an unfavorable outcome. Nevertheless, through sharp and insightful analysis, Parry persuasively makes the case that these avenues are meaningful starting points for future generations seeking to protect the climate.  

Ronald Pipkin Service Award

CO-WINNER: Susan S. Silbey

Few names are more synonymous with law and society scholarship than Professor Silbey’s. Her research has long examined the relationship between law and lived experiences. Her much-lauded 1998 book, The Common Place of Law (co-authored with Patricia Ewick), helped define the field of legal consciousness, offering a deeply sociological account of how people talk about, experience, and reproduce “hegemonic legality.” Silbey and Ewick argue that legal consciousness is not simply a matter of internal belief—it is a patterned way of enacting law and interacting with systems of power, made up of shared cultural schemas that shape how law is understood and navigated in everyday life.

An anchor within the Law and Society Association for over 40 years, Silbey is known throughout the organization as a valued mentor—one who demands rigor, precision, and clarity, but does so with generosity and warmth. Many of today’s leading law and society scholars, including multiple former LSA presidents, trace their intellectual roots to her mentorship. Her colleagues and former students describe her as someone who takes ideas seriously, who reads widely and deeply across disciplines, and who relishes engaging with others’ work as much as she does refining her own. She is fiercely committed to dialogue and discovery, and her mentoring relationships are marked by deep thought, critical feedback, and lasting intellectual bonds.

In addition to serving on the Board of Trustees as President (1995-1996) and as Editor of the Law and Society Review (1998-2001), Professor Silbey has held a long list of service roles within LSA. There are too many to name, but among them include: Treasurer, Trustee (class of 2020), and Chair of the Program Committee, Publications Committee, Nominations Committee, multiple prize committees, the Local Arrangements Committee, and the LSR Editor Search Committee. Her leadership in these roles helped shape not only the trajectory of sociolegal research but also the core structures and values of the community that surrounds it.

CO-WINNER: Penny Andrews

A distinguished member of LSA for over 25 years, Professor Penelope Andrews has contributed immensely to the intellectual and institutional life of the Association. Her leadership has strengthened LSA’s global presence, supported new generations of scholars, and fostered a more inclusive and vibrant community. Her long-standing commitment to service has helped shape the organization’s growth and evolution.

As LSA President from 2019 to 2021, Professor Andrews guided the Association through the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her steady and compassionate leadership during this time ensured that the Association remained connected, responsive, and forward-looking. She worked closely with members, staff, and students to sustain programming and deepen the Association’s international engagement, with a particular focus on expanding participation from the Global South. Beyond her presidency, Professor Andrews served as Co-Chair of the 2014 Program Committee for LSA’s pivotal 50th Anniversary Meeting, LSA Trustee from 2011 to 2014, Co-Chair of the International Activities Committee, Chair of the Ad Hoc African Renaissance Committee, and member of several other key committees, including the Diversity Committee, the Nominations Committee, and the Program Committee. In addition to co-founding and hosting the South African Reading Group in New York City for nearly three decades, creating a unique space for interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and students, Professor Andrews has helped organize scholarly events across the U.S., Canada, and South Africa, always centering equity, access, and intellectual rigor.

Through all of her roles—in the academy, the profession, and especially within LSA—Professor Andrews has consistently demonstrated vision, generosity, and commitment to community. Her leadership has helped make the Association more inclusive, more international, and more attuned to the evolving challenges of sociolegal scholarship.

Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award

CO-WINNER: Veronica Fynn Bruey

The life story of Dr. Veronica Fynn Bruey is inspiring in and of itself. A survivor of violence and trauma due to the Liberian Civil War, she has overcome innumerable odds to serve in her current capacity as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Alberta. In a relatively abbreviated time, and despite the obstacles placed in her way, she has amassed an astonishing breadth of accomplishments. Armed with six prestigious degrees from four different continents, she has taught at multiple institutions around the globe, from Canada’s Athabasca University to Ghana’s University of Cape Coast.

She has published one full monograph, three more edited books, two children’s books,19 book chapters, 11 articles, 20 book reviews, 13 opinion-editorials and blog posts, and 5 reports. She has been an editorial leader for multiple international journals over the years, including the Journal of Internal Displacement in Canada, which she founded and runs as the Editor-in-Chief.

Dr. Bruey uses her success to support and uplift dialogues, voices, and people who have traditionally been ignored or overlooked. Remarkably, she started this work as an undergraduate student, when she founded Africa Awareness, a student-driven initiative responsible for instituting the first and only African Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, in 2002. Her list of trainees/mentees for academic year 2023-2024 is 49 students long, and they cut across the globe, hailing from Canada, Nigeria, Mexico, India, South Africa, Kenya, the United States, and elsewhere. Her intellectual guidance has been formative for her mentees, which includes her peers as well as students. One of her students shared how meaningful it has been for him to have a mentor and advisor—a woman of color—in which he can see himself. One of her colleagues celebrated the incredible impact she has on her non-minority peers, their own education about the experiences of others, and the approaches to teaching and mentoring in their academic work.

CO-WINNER: Herbert M. Kritzer

As a mentor, Professor Emeritus Herbert Kritzer is extraordinary. Former students and junior colleagues alike describe him as, among other things, “a mentor’s mentor,” “a good listener,” a “mentor [with] . . . a unique gift [and] a grounded humanity,” and a “community servant.” The majority of former students claim that, as “green” graduate students, they could not have thrived without his excellent skills in understanding his students and without his careful guidance, which “never made [them] feel inadequate.” Now retired, Professor Emeritus Kritzer used a unique blend of deep compassion and rigor to teach his courses, read and comment on paper drafts, interrogate and improve research methods, and assist in the production and publication of scholarly papers.

Highlighting his enormous generosity, selflessness, and brilliance as a mentor, his advisees celebrate the unique blend of compassion and rigor that characterized his teaching, paper comments, research guidance, and support in the scholarly publication process. Each of his former students, now prominent scholar-professors in their own right, note that they have turned to Professor Emeritus Kritzer for advice and assistance throughout their academic careers. For most, he has even extended his mentorship after switching institutions and eventually retiring.

Given the great benefits of his mentorship on them, Professor Emeritus Kritzer’s former-students-turned-professors have sought to emulate his impactful approach. He has clearly inspired his mentees to pass on his generosity and precision as they move on with their careers and with their own students.

Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize

CO-WINNER: Valerie P. Hans

Valerie P. Hans, Ph.D. is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she teaches courses on social science and law, jury systems, and torts. As a graduate student in psychology at the University of Toronto, she attended her first LSA meeting in Minnesota and was hooked! Her lifelong participation as an active member of the Law & Society Association has enriched her scholarship on juries and other forms of citizen participation in legal decision making. Author of ten books and over 150 research articles, she is currently studying recent adoptions of new jury-like systems in several countries worldwide, inspired by law and society colleagues in the CRN on Lay Participation in Legal Systems that she co-organizes, and in the East Asian Law and Society CRN. She was gratified to receive the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award in 2012 in recognition of her mentorship of law and society scholars, and to serve as LSA President from 2015-2017.

CO-WINNER: Robert L. Nelson

Robert Nelson holds the MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the American Bar Foundation and has been a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University for over 40 years.  Bob’s scholarship stands out, not only due to his dedication to empirical rigor, but also his ability to bridge traditional academic boundaries. His work integrates sociological, legal, and economic frameworks, encouraging scholars to examine law as dynamically intertwined with larger social forces. Whether through analyzing labor market changes, disparities in access to justice, or the organizational shifts in legal institutions, his scholarship consistently challenges conventional paradigms to introduce bold, relational frameworks. 

The focal point of Bob’s career over the several decades has been the 25-year longitudinal study of the legal profession, entitled “After the JD.” By analyzing the careers of lawyers, it examines and illuminates fundamental theoretical and sociological questions concerning the relationship between structure and agency in a particular field, the highly stratified occupational system of American law.   This is a masterwork in law and society scholarship, collecting and analyzing unprecedented quantitative and qualitative data on the career trajectories of legal professionals.  Based on data from a nationally representative cohort of lawyers (including a crucial oversample of attorneys of color) who passed the Bar in the year 2000, the book and published articles report analyses of over 10,000 survey responses from 2003, 2007, 2012, and web data from 2019. The work is enriched through a mixed methods approach, featuring in-depth interviews with over 200 lawyers at those three points in time. The scope and ambition of this work are a jaw dropping tour de force, as it skillfully presents an almost unparalleled—and indeed necessary—view of how modern legal careers are forged.

Bob’s work has also focused on inequality at work and the legal options available to those facing barriers to opportunity. In his work, Legalizing Gender Inequality, Bob shows that male-female earnings differentials cannot be explained adequately by market forces, principles of efficiency, or society-wide sexism. Rather, he explains gender pay differentials by showing how employing organizations tend to disadvantage holders of predominantly female jobs by denying them power in organizational politics and reproducing male cultural advantages.

Congrats to all of the LSA 2025 Honorable Mention selections!

LSA kicks off its 2025 Annual Meeting on Thursday, May 22. Visit this year’s conference website to learn more.

2025 LSA AWARDS

James Willard Hurst Book Prize
Allison Powers | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Herbert Jacob Book Prize
Liz Chiarello | Washington University in St. Louis

Honorable Mention – Iván Darío Vargas-Roncancio | York University

Law and Society Association Article Prize
Mirian G. Martinez-Aranda | University of California, Irvine

Honorable Mention – Yuvraj Joshi | Brooklyn Law School

Dissertation Prize
Du Fei | University of Oklahoma

Honorable Mention – Faith M. Deckard | University of California, Los Angeles

John Hope Franklin Prize
Jasmine E. Harris | University of Pennsylvania

Daniel S. Harawa | New York University

Honorable Mention – Giuliana Perrone | University of California, Santa Barbara

Graduate Student Paper Prize
Iolanthe Brooks | Northwestern University

Roberta S. Pamplona | University of Toronto

Undergraduate Student Paper Prize
Celia Parry | Pomona College

Avani Singh | University of California, Berkeley

Ronald Pipkin Service Award
Susan S. Silbey | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Penny Andrews | New York Law School

Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award
Veronica Fynn Bruey | Athabasca University

Herbert M. Kritzer | University of Minnesota

Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize
Valerie P. Hans | Cornell University

Robert L. Nelson | American Bar Foundation, Northwestern University

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association in coordination with the Executive Office, Prize Committees and President Laura Beth Nielsen, honors the winners of its 2022 Annual Awards, as 21 law and society scholars took home prizes this June. Each year, the LSA recognizes outstanding scholarly publications and contributions to the law and society community. This year, the Association will honor the award recipients during the first-ever hybrid Global Meeting on Law & Society, which will take place both in Lisbon, Portugal and virtually from July 13-16. This year’s conference features over 4,500 attendees, representing nearly 100 different countries, making it the largest Global Meeting to date.

The Award Ceremony will take place in Lisbon at the host institution (ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon) in Building II Grande Auditório at 10:15 a.m. (Lisbon Time) on Friday, July 15. The ceremony will also be streamed live to the 2022 virtual conference website and may be available on-demand afterwards. Attendees who plan on watching the ceremony virtually will need to login to their LSA profiles to access the video. To view more information about each of the winners, visit the LSA Awards Page here.

“Congratulations to this year’s award winners for their creative and pathbreaking scholarship,” said President Nielsen. “These prizes highlight the significant work of our members and demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinary empirical work to fully understand the relationship between law and society.”

Read the Full Release here!

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association in coordination with the Executive Office, Prize Committees and President Penelope Andrews, honors the winners of its 2021 Annual Awards, as 22 law and society scholars took home prizes this May. Each year, the LSA recognizes outstanding scholarly publications and contributions to the law and society community. The association currently offers 12 prizes for scholarship, awarded at the Annual Meeting, which will take place at the association’s second and largest Virtual conference, due to the ongoing pandemic.

The award ceremony will be held online on Saturday, May 29, at 11 a.m. CT. Annual Meeting registration is required to attend the ceremony live. A recording of the ceremony will be available on-demand afterwards. To view more information about each of the winners on our brand-new website, check out our Awards Page here.

“These awards reflect some of the best law and society scholarship each year, and I’m thrilled to see the diverse range of disciplines represented across our membership,” said LSA Executive Officer Steven Boutcher.

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Professors Dee Smythe and Kelley Moult of the University of Cape Town were chosen for the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award for their joint efforts in mentoring law and society scholars and graduate/law students on the African continent. This is the first time the Wheeler Award has gone to scholars based in the Global South and the first time it has been awarded for joint work.

Simply put, by advising dozens of graduate students and early career scholars from across Africa, and by organizing large conferences and small writing workshops for hundreds more early career African scholars who are not their students, Smythe and Moult are among the most prominent builders of a law and society community in Africa. Among their activities have been the two Law and Society in Africa conferences (in Cape Town in 2016 and in Cairo in 2019), and the two Socio-Legal Studies Early Career Scholar Workshops in Africa (2017, 2019, both in Cape Town). Smythe and Moult have created the Centre for Law and Society at the University of Cape Town, which one nominating letter described as “the leading hub for nurturing a new generation of sociolegal scholarship in Africa.” Among others, they have secured funding for the Centre from the National Research Foundation in South Africa and American-based foundations including Carnegie, Ford and Open Society.

Not only have they put time and effort into creating infrastructure for a supportive scholarly community, but they are also excellent mentors for their individual graduate students. One of their students made this comment about their joint supervision of her PhD dissertation: “I used to have reservations about having two supervisors, especially for a doctoral dissertation. My reservation was probably because most of my friends did not have good stories to tell. I must say, however, that the duo proved me wrong. They were telepathically on the same page and always timeously responded to my research. Their supervision understanding rivalled the understanding of identical twins! They helped me to develop my research, writing, administrative, reporting and time management skills, and thereby improved my (previously terrible) confidence and expertise.”

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Carrasco’s paper offers a sophisticated empirical and normative analysis of the how the unconscionability doctrine—one of the few doctrines in contract law that encourages judges to invalidate contracts that are grossly disadvantageous to poor consumers—operates to reinforce vulnerability in racialized and gendered ways. Through content analysis of judicial opinions in three of the nation’s poorest states, the author reveals that finding the weaker party vulnerable is an integral component of how courts understand unconscionability. Courts fail to rule on the ultimate morality of many unconscionable contracts, instead using the vulnerability of parties as a mechanism for invalidating contracts. Businesses prevail the majority of the time. When they lose, their loss is contingent upon a paternalistic view of the weaker party as so vulnerable as to be incompetent to enter into a contract. By focusing on the vulnerability of the weaker party, the courts reinforce notions of racial minorities, women, and the lower class as incapable legal parties.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Kim Lane Scheppele, who served as LSA President from 2017-19, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She held tenure in the political science department at the University of Michigan, taught full-time in the law school at the University of Pennsylvania, was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Michigan, Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin. Scheppele's work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. Following 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting the rise of autocratic legalism first in Hungary and then in Poland within the European Union, as well as its spread around the world. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize.

Howard S. Erlanger, who served as LSA President from 2003-05, is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law Emeritus and Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he served as a full-time faculty member from 1971 to 2013. He continues to teach part-time. Erlanger is the recipient of a number of awards for his teaching and research, including the Steiger and Underkofler awards for Distinguished Teaching from the UW, the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award from LSA (2010), and selection as an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. He has served multiple terms on the LSA Board of Trustees and also as Secretary (1995-1997). He currently serves as LSA Treasurer.  

Erlanger served for many years as director of the Institute for Legal Studies at UW Law, and as director of the Center for Law, Society and Justice in UW’s College of Letters and Science. Since 1982, he has served as Review Section editor of Law and Social Inquiry. His own sociolegal research focused on the legal profession — especially on the careers of lawyers in public interest practice and the socialization of law students — and on topics related to dispute resolution and to organizational implementation of law.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Carroll Seron | University of California-Irvine

Carroll Seron is Professor Emerita in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Irvine. She is Past-President of the Law & Society Association, 2013-2015, and former Editor of the Law & Society Review, volumes 42-44. Seron studies the organizations and culture of the professions, including law and engineering. In addition to her books on the legal profession, Seron has published in various peer reviewed journals, including Law & Society Review, American Sociological Review, Work & Occupations, Criminology, Annual Review of Sociology, Annual Review of Law & Social Sciences and The Annals of American Political and Social Science.

In her retirement she is working with colleagues at UC Irvine to develop a demonstration project to extend access to currently incarcerated students to earn a B.A. degree through the University of California.

Keith Hawkins | University of Oxford

Keith Hawkins is an Emeritus Professor of Law and Society at Oxford University. His research interests are in the sociology of legal processes, and are concerned with legal decision making and the workings of governmental regulation in such areas as environmental control, and occupational health and safety regulations. Hawkins is the recipient of LSA’s 2003 Herbert Jacob Book Prize for his book, Law as Last Resort: Prosecution Decision-Making in a Regulatory Agency (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Malcolm M. Feeley | University of California-Berkeley

Serving as LSA President from 2005-07, Malcolm Feeley is an Emeritus Professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. He served as Berkeley’s director of the campus Center for the Study of Law and Society from 1987 to 1992. Feeley was recently selected to the Class of 2020 American Academy of Arts & Sciences. A recipient of LSA’s 2015 Harry J. Kalven Jr Prize, his work on the counterintuitive and counterproductive effects of punishment policy has inspired generations of sociolegal scholars. Feeley has repeatedly documented the realities of criminal justice in America (and beyond) as well as the effects of legal reforms. He has written or edited over a dozen books, and has authored several dozen articles in social science journals and law reviews.

Bryant Garth | University of California-Irvine

A two-time winner of LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize and 2019 recipient of the Association’s Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize, Bryant Garth’s scholarship focuses on the legal profession, the sociology of law, and globalization. Co-authored with Yves Dezalay, Dealing in Virtue (1996) and Asian Legal Revivals (2010), were given the Herbert Jacobs in 1998 and 2011, respectively. Garth also served as co-editor of the Journal of Legal Education from 2011-14. He is a Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus for the University of California-Irvine, serving as Co-Director for the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession.

David B. Wilkins | Harvard University

David Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Wilkins has written over 80 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press and is the co-author (along with his Harvard Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) of one of the leading casebooks in the field. One of his current projects, After the JD is a 10-year nationwide longitudinal study of lawyers' careers. His recent academic honors include the 2012 Honorary Doctorate in Law from Stockholm University in Sweden, the 2012 Distinguished Visiting Mentor Award from Australia National University, the 2012 Genest Fellowship from Osgoode Hall Law School, the 2010 American Bar Foundation Scholar of the Year Award, the 2009 J. Clay Smith Award from Howard University School of Law, and the 2008 Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor Fellowship. In 2012, Professor Wilkins was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Neil Vidmar | Duke University

Terence C. Halliday is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation; Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University; and Honorary Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Adam Podgerecki Prize for Career Achievement in the Sociology of Law and Sociolegal Scholarship (2013), and multiple prizes from the American Sociological Association and Asian Law and Society Association.

Halliday has made important contributions to the comparative and historical sociology and politics of legal professions. In a series of books with Lucien Karpik, Malcolm Feeley, and many country specialists, he advanced the particularly influential theory that a “legal complex” frequently is in the vanguard of struggles for political liberalism—a moderate state, core civil rights and basic legal freedoms—as a discrete but professionally valued good, research extended in the politics of lawyers in 21^st century China (Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work, Cambridge, 2016, with Sida Liu).

Halliday’s second area of major scholarly achievement is his body of work on law and globalization. Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2009, with Bruce Carruthers) is a path-breaking study of the recursivity of global lawmaking between the global and national following the Asian Financial Crisis, a line of research extended to an intensive study of global lawmakers in the UN (Global Lawmakers: International Organizations in the Crafting of World Markets, Cambridge 2018, with Susan Block-Lieb) and a series of empirical and theoretical studies addressing transnational legal ordering (e.g., Transnational Legal Orders, Cambridge 2015, with Gregory Shaffer) in relation to constitution-making, human rights, criminal justice, economic law, private law and fiduciary law.  

Margaret Kwoka is a Professor of Law at the University of Denver-Sturm College of Law. Kwoka's scholarship on government transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) epitomizes LSA’s motto of “analyzing legal practice, envisioning social justice.” Her project assesses whether FOIA is working the way its drafters intended. By posing this question, which reflects LSA’s commitment to empirical work, Professor Kwoka revolutionized FOIA scholarship. She has exposed a cottage industry designed to profit from filing FOIA requests and revealed the burdensome use of FOIA by individuals.

Her exhaustively researched body of scholarship provides unprecedented and detailed empirical findings on how FOIA works in practice. Professor Kwoka’s work helped shape recent judicial investigations of FOIA. Multiple federal agencies and the United States Senate have invited her to testify, and have benefitted from her empirical rigor and FOIA expertise. Kwoka has remained deeply connected to the practice of law, serving as pro bono counsel for information access litigation, drafting amicusii briefs on FOIA issues, and serving on the Federal Freedom of Information Advisory Committee. Moreover, Professor Kwoka's innovative proposals for balancing government transparency against unintended FOIA uses in order to improve the overburdened federal records access scheme have already informed governmental FOIA reform efforts.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

LSA’s Jacobs Prize for the best book this year was awarded to Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press 2019) by Jeffrey S. Kahn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis.

Islands of Sovereignty focuses on the process and politics of border creation by studying the U.S./Haiti maritime border and boat migration in the latter part of the 20th century. Kahn’s analysis demonstrates that the struggles to maintain this border changed how we understand and define the United States spatially. The particular ways the border is maintained, Kahn demonstrates, brought about new forms of legal activism, border governance, and oceanic policing that have remade the American nation-state politically as well. Kahn teaches us about the strategic use of categorization at the border to achieve particular political ends, namely containment and securitization.

Professor Kahn’s ethnography was described by one committee member as, “breathtaking.” He spent years in the immigration tribunal courts of Florida, Coast Guard boats patrolling the Caribbean, Guantanamo Bay, and Haiti itself to elaborate how asylum litigation is not just about individual outcomes but comes to define the nation-state. These contests define borders, the legal infrastructure, and ultimately the US’s tendency toward Empire—achieved with racialized understandings of geography focused on security and threat. Combined with the archival analysis of hundreds of asylum cases and other relevant legal authority, Islands of Sovereignty presents a compelling argument that conflict at and about the border have transformative consequences well beyond the border itself.  These conflicts have important consequences for how we understand the nation-state itself.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Ulrike Schultz is an outstanding scholar in her field and is internationally renowned for her work on women/gender in the legal profession. Serving as LSA’s CRN organizer of its Gender and Judging group, she has been an inspiring colleague for the Legal Profession Group and has assumed national and international leadership roles in the law and society field. Her presence on the Board of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oňati has been highly lauded and appreciated, and she presently navigates the IISL through difficult times in her role as President of the Research Committee for the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association (RCSL) since 2018.

Schultz is a sociolegal scholar of outstanding international reputation, who combines excellence in scholarship with a rare talent for bringing together diverse interests, nationalities and languages for a common cause. Her activities and research span several decades since the 1970s, during which the field of sociolegal studies and the sociology of law was thriving both in her native Germany and internationally. Presently, she is co-organizer and co-editor of the follow-up to the Lawyers in Society project together with Richard Abel, Hillary Sommerlad and Ole Hammerslev. The project “Lawyers in the 21st Century Societies” will publish two comprehensive volumes—one with national reports on 46 countries, and a second one with thematic chapters. 

Stefan Machura is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Bangor University’s School of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom. He has been an LSA member since 1992 and served on the program committee for the Berlin conference in 2007. Since 2014, Machura has served as a board member of the Research Committee for the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association (RCSL). From 2000 to 2008, Machura served as speaker of the Sociology of Law Section of the German Sociological Association. He has published several books, including Oxford Encyclopedia on Crime, Media, and Popular Culture (2018), Eugen Ehrlich‘s Sociology of Law (2014), Understanding Law in Society (2011) and Law and Film (2001).

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Leor Halevi’s  Modern Things on Trial: Islam's Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida 1865-1935 (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a model of how to do truly globalized legal history. It masterfully traverses time and place to provide fresh insights into how ideas, people and commodities have travelled in the Islamic world over time. The book invites us to re-examine afresh some of life’s most mundane items –including some of the most discussed commodities of the Covid19 era, all the while enriching how we understand the history of the Islamic world.

Sarah Seo’s Policing the Open Road (Harvard University Press, 2019) provides an exceedingly well-researched and detailed account of the modern history of policing and police power in the US, and its impact on individual rights to privacy. It provides both a skillful overview of the caselaw on the topic and rich perspective on the individual, social, and contextual forces at play in the growth of the police’s power to surveil citizens in their cars.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

 Tony Cheng’s innovative paper, “Social Media and Shaping the Social Memory of Police (Mis)Conduct,” explores how, in the post-Ferguson era of greater scrutiny of their actions, police independently mobilize through social media to strategically disseminate information, shape public discourse and cultivate their own constituencies. Ostensibly a non-political arm of the state and formally subject to civilian control, police nonetheless take on an independent political role in many communities. Content analysis of Twitter feeds and news articles in New York City reveals how police use social media to release strategically framed information that justifies their actions as necessary and appropriate. While much scholarship focuses on social media as a democratizing tool, this study shows how a state actor harnesses that same capacity not only for surveillance and enforcement, but also for strategic mobilization. The state may be defined by its monopoly on violence, but as the violence of that monopoly is increasingly publicized, the monopoly must be increasingly legitimized.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Bernadette Atuahene is Professor of Law at IIT, Chicago-Kent College of Law and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. After her graduate work, she served as a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, practiced as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, and served as a consultant for the World Bank and the South African Land Restitution Commission.

Atuahene’s research focuses on land dispossession affecting people of the African diaspora. Her article “Predatory Cities” methodically and empirically documents how state actors have used illegal methods to augment public coffers that strategically harm communities of color. She has written several articles and a book manuscript entitled, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press, 2014). She also directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. She has been honored with the Fulbright Fellowship, Council on Foreign Relation’s International Affairs Fellowship, Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, and the Soros Equality Fellowship. She is currently working on a National Science Foundation funded research project, exploring land dispossession in Detroit. Atuahene serves as co-organizer of LSA’s Collaborative Research Network (CRN) on Sociolegal Approaches to Property (SLAP) and is an LSA Trustee. 

Professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California-Irvine and has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States on human trafficking. She is the author/editor of six books and has been featured in numerous prestigious news mediums and publications. Goodwin’s article “The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration” argues that this preservation of the practice of slavery through its transformation into prison labor means only that socially, legislatively, and judicially, we have come to reject one form of discrimination: antebellum slavery, while distinguishing it from marginally remunerated and totally unremunerated prison labor, which courts legitimate. She has advised or given testimony before state and federal governments, and her writings have been consulted by courts, legislators, government agencies, and civil society organizations. Goodwin is an LSA CRN organizer for Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a law professor at the University of Denver who studies the intersection of criminal and immigration law. In December 2019, he published Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, about the United States’ reliance on prisons to enforce immigration law. In 2015, he published his first book, Crimmigration Law. His article “Deconstructing Crimmigration” traces crimmigration law’s origins and details its harms to people, institutions, and law before offering a theoretical challenge to crimmigration law. His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Salon, and elsewhere, and he has been quoted by numerous additional mass media organizations. César publishes crimmigration.com, a blog about the convergence of criminal and immigration law. He has been a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia and is currently a member of the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Emily Prifogle’s dissertation opens with the sentence, “Law does not land on all spaces equally,” which summarizes the central thesis of her work—the work of law in constituting the rural in America. Much of 19th-20th century US legal history on regulation have focused on the cities and suburbs, recognizing the unprecedented urbanization of that time. Prifogle’s dissertation “Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975,” excavates the construction of the rural Midwest through five case studies, ranging from policing, land use and zoning, education, labor rights and community organizing, showing how “rural values” were asserted and inscribed in the law, as distinct from urban/national values. She also shows how these norms were increasingly contested by individuals and organizations. It makes visible immigrants and minorities, women and college students (the emergence of large land grant campuses) and rural lawyers who all play a role in reshaping the region. 

Tommaso Pavone conducted 350 interviews in Italy, France, and Germany in his dissertation, “The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe.” Using innovative methodological approaches, including patio-temporal mapping, Pavone advances an alternative narrative   of the actors behind the institutionalization of European law: entrepreneurial lawyers as opposed to ‘activist judges’ or courts were the motors of European legal integration. Their repertoire of action involved constructing cases as well as becoming “ghostwriters” of case referrals to the European Court of Justice. At the same time, their repertoire of action eventually became co-opted by expensive Euro firms that may often mobilize EU law in the interest of business, as opposed to citizens as their entrepreneurial predecessors did. Pavone’s dissertation falls clearly in the field of law & society and makes both empirical and theoretical contributions, especially when it comes to understanding transnational legal change. It is written in a compelling manner, weaving theory building with data analysis.

Pavone’s dissertation is compelling to read. He is particularly skilled at integrating and presenting his wealth of data in the dissertation without overwhelming the reader, simultaneously bringing it into conversation with law & society scholarship. On the contrary, his writing style is both accessible and allows the reader to imagine herself in the spaces where he conducted his research, in true ethnographic style.

Michael Gibson-Light’s dissertation, “The Prison as Market: How Penal Labor Systems Reproduce Inequality,” is an account of work within the prisons and hierarchies that exist within prison work. The author points to the distinctions within the prison as experienced by the prisoners in terms of pay and the conditions of work-distinction between the food assembly work, at an auto garage and the coveted call center and sign shop. While there has been extensive work on the pre and post prison inequalities in the age of mass incarceration, here the focus is on the inequalities of work (social class) within the prison itself. The author did extensive fieldwork in a prison for 18 months and interviewed 82 prisoners and staff, and volunteered at some of the sites of work. Even as extensive research is being done of pre and post prison experiences, a study of social classes within the prison makes the question unique, the methodology is impressive-extensive fieldwork, and the theoretical framing is multilayered-neoliberal penologyto class stratification. The rich and textured descriptions of the experiences of the prisoners helps us understand the self-worth of individuals, class hierarchies within, and the forms of resistances that exist.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her paper, “The Imperial Serologist and Punitive Self-Harm: Bloodstains and Legal Pluralism in British India,” examines precipitin testing, a form of serum analysis that identified the species of origin of a bloodstain. She is the author of Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772- 1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the LSA Hurst Prize in 2015. She is currently working on a book project on falsity and forensic science in colonial India, with support from Princeton’s Davis Center (2018) and an ACLS Burkhardt fellowship ’18 (National Humanities Center, 2020-1). Sharafi is also completing articles on abortion during the Raj and the expulsion of South Asian and West African law students from the Inns of Court in London. Serving as a Trustee and co-organizer for LSA’s Collaborative Research Network (CRN) on South Asia, Sharafi hosts the South Asian Legal History Resources website and is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog.

Niina Vuolajarvi is a Mellon/ACLS dissertation fellow at the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, and a visiting PhD student at the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Princeton University. Her research focuses on technologies and cultures of governance, migration, sexuality and gender and precarization. Her article “Governing in the Name of Caring—the Nordic Model of Prostitution and its Punitive Consequences for Migrants Who Sell Sex,” examines the Nordic Model, which aims to abolish commercial sex by criminalizing the buying of sexual services while not criminalizing the selling, as the aim is to protect, rather than punish, women. Her article argues that in a situation where the majority of people who sell sex in the region are migrants, the regulation of commercial sex has shifted from prostitution to immigration policies, resulting in a double standard in the governance of national and foreign sellers of sexual services.

Past Winners * All 2020 Award Winners * All 2019 Award Winners

The Law and Society Association honors 27 scholars

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association in coordination with the Executive Office, Prize Committees and President Penelope Andrews, has announced the winners of its 2020 Annual Awards, as 27 sociolegal scholars took home honors this spring. Each year, the LSA recognizes outstanding scholarly publications and contributions to the law and society community. This year’s award recipients represent a host of various sociolegal backgrounds, training and expertise from prestigious institutions across the globe.

 
The association currently offers 12 prizes for scholarship, awarded at the Annual Meeting, which will take place online for the first time, due to COVID-19. The award ceremony will be held virtually on Wednesday, May 27, from 3-3:45 p.m. ET. Attendees are required to register for the Annual Meeting ahead of time to view the ceremony live. Click here for a direct link to the virtual awards ceremony. A recording of the ceremony will be available on-demand afterwards.

 
“LSA’s awards represent the best scholarship in the field of law and society,” said LSA Executive Officer Steven Boutcher. “The award winners come from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, and they embody the strong interdisciplinary and global community that defines the Association.”

 
LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize recognizes new, outstanding work in law and society scholarship. This year’s recipient is Jeffrey S. Kahn—Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis. Kahn’s book, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press 2019), focuses on the process and politics of border creation by studying the U.S./Haiti maritime border and boat migration in the latter part of the 20th century. Having spent years in the immigration tribunal courts of Florida, Coast Guard boats patrolling the Caribbean, Guantanamo Bay and Haiti, Kahn’s ethnography was described by one committee member as, “breathtaking.”

 
Recognizing the best book in sociolegal history, this year’s J. Willard Hurst Book Prize went to Leor Halevi of Vanderbilt University. Halevi’s Modern Things on Trial: Islam's Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida 1865-1935 (Columbia University Press 2019) is a model of how to conduct globalized legal history. It traverses time and place to provide fresh insights into how ideas, people and commodities have travelled in the Islamic world over time.

 
Taking home the LSA Article Prize was University of Wisconsin’s Mitra Sharafi for her paper, “The Imperial Serologist and Punitive Self-Harm: Bloodstains and Legal Pluralism in British India.” The article examines precipitin testing, a form of serum analysis that identified the species of origin of a bloodstain. A legal historian of South Asia, Sharafi earned her second major LSA award in five years after winning the J. Willard Hurst Prize in 2015 for her book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Serving as a Trustee and co-organizer for LSA’s Collaborative Research Network (CRN) on South Asia, Sharafi hosts the South Asian Legal History Resources website and is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog.

 
This year’s Dissertation Prizes went to Emily Prifogle (University of Michigan) and Tommaso Pavone (Pluri Courts Centre at the University of Oslo). Prifogle’s dissertation “Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975,” excavates the construction of the rural Midwest through five case studies, ranging from policing, land use and zoning, education, labor rights and community organizing, showing how “rural values” were asserted and inscribed in the law, as distinct from urban and national values.

 
Pavone conducted 350 interviews in Italy, France, and Germany in his dissertation, “The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe.” Integrating and presenting his wealth of data in the dissertation, Pavone advances an alternative narrative of the actors behind the institutionalization of European law: entrepreneurial lawyers as opposed to ‘activist judges’ or courts were the motors of European legal integration. Their repertoire of action involved constructing cases as well as becoming “ghostwriters” of case referrals to the European Court of Justice.

 
Bernadette Atuahene of Chicago-Kent College of Law became the LSA’s 10th recipient of the John Hope Franklin Prize, which was established in 2010 to recognize exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law. Her article “Predatory Cities” methodically and empirically documents how state actors have used illegal methods to augment public coffers that strategically harm communities of color. Co-organizer of LSA’s CRN on Sociolegal Approaches to Property (SLAP) and an LSA Trustee, Atuahene’s research focuses on land dispossession affecting people of the African diaspora.

 
As for the student prizes, Tony Cheng (Yale University) won the Graduate Student Paper award, while Anthony Carrasco (University of California-Berkeley) took home the Undergraduate Student Paper honor.

 
Cheng—a Sociology PhD Candidate at Yale—wrote “Social Media and Shaping the Social Memory of Police (Mis)Conduct,” which explores how, in the post-Ferguson era of greater scrutiny of their actions, police independently mobilize through social media to strategically disseminate information, shape public discourse and cultivate their own constituencies. Cheng’s research interests include criminal justice, urban sociology and law and society. He holds a JD from New York University. 

 
Motivated by his own personal hardships, Carrasco wrote “Unconscionability, Vulnerability, and Other Sociopolitical Constructions of the Judicial Imagination,” in which he combined qualitative and normative methods to explain how the concept of vulnerability operates within the application of the unconscionability doctrine through the analysis of a random sample of legal opinions in three of the poorest states in the U.S. (Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas). The first in his family to attend college, Carrasco recently earned two degrees—one in Legal Studies, another in Political Science—along with a minor degree in Public Policy.

 
Two LSA Past Presidents in Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University) and Howard Erlanger (University of Wisconsin) were chosen for the Ronald Pipkin Service Award. Both of these renowned law and society scholars earned their second-career LSA prize, as Scheppele won the Harry J. Kalven award in 2014 and Erlanger received the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award in 2010.

 
Erlanger, who served as LSA president from 2003-05, has held just about every officer position within the association, currently fulfilling the role of Treasurer. In addition to being a force in rationalizing and improving the Association’s finances and financial record-keeping, Erlanger has educated and mentored key LSA stakeholders on the Association’s budget and has explained the budgeting process to many former treasurers.

 
Fresh off her LSA presidential term (2017-19), Scheppele has brought transparency and accountability to the operation of the LSA, and her pursuit of a strategic plan for the Association will be key to its long-term survival in which the association will continue to thrive. Under her leadership, Scheppele has assured the stability and strength of the association, its ongoing operations and vision for a bright future that LSA now enjoys.

 
A University of Cape Town duo made LSA history in jointly earning the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award by a unanimous decision. Professors Dee Smythe and Kelly Moult were honored for their tireless efforts at mentoring numerous law and society students on the African continent. This marks the first time the Wheeler Award has gone to scholars based in the Global South and the first time it has been awarded for joint work.

 
In addition to advising dozens of students, Smythe and Moult have been renowned for organizing large conferences and small writing workshops for hundreds of early-career African scholars. Taking the lead on nurturing a new generation of sociolegal scholarship in Africa, the Cape Town duo are responsible for securing funding for the Centre for Law and Society (CLS) from the National Research Foundation in South Africa and other American-based foundations.

 
The Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize was awarded to two scholars this year. Terence C. Halliday (American Bar Foundation) and Margaret Kwoka (University of Denver-Sturm College of Law) earned this year’s award for most effectively advancing research in law and society. Halliday serves as a co-organizer for LSA’s CRN on Global and Transnational Legal Ordering. His outstanding contributions to the sociolegal field pertain to his influential theory of the “legal complex” and his body of work on theorizing and empirically studying law and globalization.

 
Kwoka’s scholarship on government transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been portrayed as revolutionary, as it assesses whether the legislation is working the way its drafters intended. Her work has helped shape recent judicial investigations of FOIA and has even informed governmental reform efforts. Multiple federal agencies and the United States Senate have invited her to testify, and have benefitted from her empirical rigor and FOIA expertise.

 
In recognition of significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of law and society, the International Prize went to Ulrike Schultz of Fernuniversität in Hagen. Schultz organizes the Gender and Judging CRN and serves as President of the Research Committee for the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association (RCSL). Schultz  has been an inspiring colleague for RCSL’s Legal Profession Group. She has assumed national and international leadership roles in the field of sociolegal studies and the sociology of law. Her activities and research span several decades since the 1970s, during which the field of law and society was thriving both in her native country Germany and internationally. Her presence on the Board of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oňati has been highly lauded.

 
Each year, LSA honors people whose contributions significantly helped to develop the association through sustained commitment to its mission and legacy, extensive service or scholarly publications that made a lasting contribution to LSA. This year’s Legacy Award winners include Carroll Seron (University of California-Irvine), Keith Hawkins (University of Oxford), Malcolm M. Feeley (University of California-Berkeley), Bryant Garth (University of California-Irvine), David B. Wilkins (Harvard University) and Neil Vidmar (Duke University).

 
LSA will host its first-ever virtual conference from May 27-31. To register, please visit https://lawandsociety.site-ym.com/.

2020 LSA AWARDS

Law and Society Association Article Prize

Mitra Sharafi | University of Wisconsin

Honorable Mention - Niina Vuolajarvi | Rutgers University

Dissertation Prize

Emily Prifogle | University of Michigan

Tommaso Pavone | PluriCourts Centre at the University of Oslo

Honorable Mention - Michael Gibson-Light | University of Denver

John Hope Franklin Prize

Bernadette Atuahene | Chicago-Kent College of Law
Honorable Mention - Michele Goodwin |University of California-Irvine

Honorable Mention - César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández | University of Denver Sturm College of Law

Graduate Student Paper Prize

Tony Cheng | Yale University

J. Willard Hurst Book Prize

Leor Halevi | Vanderbilt University
Honorable Mention - Sarah Seo | University of Iowa

Law and Society Association International Prize

Ulrike Schultz | Fernuniversität in Hagen

Honorable Mention - Stefan Machura | Bangor University

Herbert Jacob Book Prize

Jeffrey S. Kahn | University of California-Davis

Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize

Terence C. Halliday | American Bar Foundation

Margaret Kwoka | University of Denver-Sturm College of Law

Legacy Award

Carroll Seron | University of California-Irvine

Keith Hawkins | University of Oxford

Malcolm M. Feeley | University of California-Berkeley

Bryant Garth | University of California-Irvine

David B. Wilkins | Harvard University

Neil Vidmar | Duke University

Ronald Pipkin Service Award

Kim Lane Scheppele | Princeton University

Howard Erlanger | University of Wisconsin

Undergraduate Student Paper Prize

Anthony Carrasco | University of California-Berkeley

Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award

Dee Smythe | University of Cape Town

Kelley Moult | University of Cape Town

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