UNDERGRADUATE  STUDENT AWARD -   CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR YEAR 2008

The Law and Society Association is seeking nominations for its 2008 Undergraduate Student Award which will be presented at the Joint Meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association, to be held May 27-28 at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal, Canada. The award will be offered to the undergraduate student paper or honors thesis that best represents outstanding law and society research. Papers co-authored by undergraduate students are eligible but papers co-authored with faculty or graduate students are not. The prize includes a plaque and up to $500 toward travel costs to attend the awards presentation at the meeting.  In the case of co-authors or if the Awards Committee names two winners, each winner will be awarded a plaque and the $500 prize will be divided among the winners.

Only non-student members of the Law and Society Association and graduate student members who have received papers while working as lecturers or teaching assistants may nominate papers for this undergraduate award. We seek an expanded pool of submissions, and we urge LSA members to submit undergraduate papers you admire whether or not they were written under your supervision.  In this connection think not just of current and to-be-submitted work, but also recall outstanding work you read last academic year.  So long as a paper was written within the time frame indicated below, publication does not affect award eligibility, but papers that have been once submitted are not eligible for reconsideration.  The committee will consider any paper that examines law, or law-like systems including legal institutions, in culture and society.   There are no methods constraint on what may be submitted.  Statistical, other social scientific, interpretive, historical and jurisprudential approaches are all welcome.  Past awards have gone to papers of all types.

To Have a Student’s Work Considered for the Award: (1) Only teaching members of the Law and Society Association may make nominations. (2) The paper must have been written between September 2006 and January 2008 by a matriculated undergraduate student at any institution of higher education including two-year community colleges. (3) Submissions must be in English; translations from other languages into English are welcome. (4) The paper must be double-spaced; may not exceed 18,000 words in length, including notes and references; and must be in a minimum of 12 point font.  (5)The paper must be submitted to the Committee on Student Awards.  The Committee includes Adelaide Villmoare, chair (Vassar College), Mary Bosworth, (Oxford University), Kathleen Hull (University of Minnesota), Elizabeth Joh (University of California, Davis), John Kerbs (East Carolina University), and Orly Lobel (University of San Diego). (6) The committee prefers electronic submission. All submissions are due by February 15, 2008 (transmission date).

To submit electronically:

Files must be in Word or PDF format.  Email to: Adelaide Villmoare <villmoare@vassar.edu> by February 15, 2008