| Year | Individual(s) | Basis for the Award |
|
2008 |
(joint winners)
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff |
Jean and John Comaroff both individually and together are leading figures in cultural anthropology, renowned especially for their joint work on legality as a register of history, consciousness, and contemporary politics of culture. Their ethnographic analyses of law as a site of indigenous agency in colonial and postcolonial South Africa, and as a cultural context for the emergence of rights consciousness out of colonial experience, have influenced many scholars. Their contribution to the empirical study of law and society in the broadest sense has been to theorize the processes through which culture becomes recognizable as social identity. They have made major contributions to field-based ethnographic methodology on key questions of agency, creativity, power and meaning (and their interrelationships). Their projects discern and probe evidence of consciousness, contestation and context that make imagination simultaneously an ethnographic question and a force of history. Their work keyed to repertoires of signs and practices in open-ended dialectics delves deeply into the specificities of ethnography and history for the meanings (always plural) of the moment. Their influence, from their early careers in the UK to their present eminence in the US, is no doubt partly a reflection of the dedication and energy they bring to their collegiality and pedagogy. They are famously devoted teachers and generous colleagues. But the creativity and importance of their ethnographic approach is evident all along the lengthy trail of their published work, through its ethnographic openings and innovative debates over the legality of culture and the culturality of law, in theory and practice. |
|
2007 |
Sally Engle Merry | Sally Merry is a prolific scholar, who has produced a substantial, original, and consistently high quality body of empirical scholarship spanning more than a quarter century. Her empirical, often ethnographic, research is characterized by meticulous attention to detail and is well grounded in the actual operation of legal systems. Yet the work simultaneously implicates fundamental themes of law and society research. In investigating the role of law in social change, for example, Merry has highlighted as well as any scholar the meaning making role of law, the interplay of resistance to and appropriation of legal norms, and the contradictory relation of law and inequality. Law may legitimate, and thereby entrench, inequalities of gender, race, or class. However, law may also challenge such unjust hierarchies and facilitate social change. Merry’s work reminds that the consequences of law very much depend on the local context, the critical features of which Merry has illuminated partly through comparative analysis of different social or national settings. While intellectually rigorous, her scholarship is also socially meaningful and policy relevant. In addressing questions of human rights and violence against women in particular, Merry demonstrates that the best of scholarship need not abandon a commitment to social justice. Merry has also played an important role in the institutional development of law and society research. |
|
2006 |
Robert A. Kagan | Robert Kagan is widely known for the significance and breadth of his empirical scholarship and for advancing major lines of research. His central contributions cut across studies of the courts, regulatory decision-making, administrative rulemaking, and the legal profession. Bringing a comparative institutions perspective, it is notable that his work has examined legal processes over time and across contexts. It is equally as notable that Kagan's expansiveness has led to the pursuit of collaborative research with scholars also rich and diverse in their perspectives and lines of inquiry. |
|
2005 |
Sally Falk Moore | Sally Falk Moore has devoted nearly half a century to thinking profoundly about the foundational issues in law and society, in African studies, and in anthropology more generally. Moore speaks to many audiences at once. She generates new anthropological knowledge, but also contributes to important policy debates. She was a global scholar before anyone had a term for this point of departure. Her career is enviably long, brilliant, engaged, and productive. She was, in her first professional life, a lawyer and prosecutor of Nazi war crimes in the famous Nuremberg trials. Moore respects human creativity and ingenuity. She shows her respect in arguing for democratic procedures in development. Moore remains optimistic and passionate about the potential for human improvement through knowledge. She shows this in her continuing devotion to research and writing. Moore believes that human misery demands an explanation, and efforts to change that situation. Africa is a continuing focus of her research, not only because it is interesting, but also because its circumstances are tragic. |
|
2004 |
John Braithwaite | Braithwaite's prolific contributions include three distinct lines of scholarly work, on corporate wrongdoing, international business regulation, and restorative justice, all of which speak to different aspects of social control. His work inspires law professors, criminologists, social scientists of law, activists, and legal practitioners. He contributes regularly to policy debates over law, crime and justice, and the promotion of legal reformers in Australia and elsewhere in the world. |
|
2003 |
Philip Selznick | Selznick's work, which is still in progress, spans over sixty years and several disciplinary domains. He has been a major figure in each of the fields he has touched, and one of a very few to have been an influential participant in them all. His books, Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (1969) and Law and Society in Transition: Toward Responsive Law (1978, with P. Nonet) continue to influence and stimulate work in law and society. He also played an important role for the field in the creation and direction of the Center for Study of Law and Society (UC-Berkeley) |
|
2002 |
(co-winner) Jane Collier |
Collier has been one of the central figures shaping work in legal anthropology in the past thirty years. Her work in Chiapas, which begin in the mid-1960s and continues into the present has focused on the ways that growing class divisions between rich and poor that accompany the spread of wage labor contribute to transformations in legal procedures that disintegrate local communities. |
| (co-winner) David Trubek |
Trubek has had a long and productive career as a law and society scholar. His early work (in the 60s and 70s) was on "law and development," focused on Brazil. The second stage of his scholarship explored the intersections between critical legal studies and the mainstream of law and society scholarship. The more recent phase, has focused on globalization of law, with particular emphases on labor relations and issues related to transformations in legal practice. | |
|
2001 |
Stuart Scheingold | Scheingold's inquiries regarding law as a tradition of discourse, the "symbolic" power and politics of law, and how understandings and beliefs about law shape legal practice -- all anticipated, interacted with, and contributed to the "interpretative turn" in sociolegal studies over the last two decades. As such, his intellectual legacy is both broad and deep. At the heart of all Scheingold's work is a deep concern for analyzing both the promises and, especially, the failings of law in securing justice with social relations. It is this combination of commitment to social justice and a boldly original scholarly agenda that has marked his important influence on law and society inquiry. |
|
2000 |
(joint winners)
E. Allan Lind and Tom R. Tyler |
Although both Lind and Tyler have made significant independent contributions as sociolegal scholars, their collaborative work in the social psychology of justice, and in particular in the area of procedural justice, represents the sort of "paradigm shifting" scholarship that the Kalven Prize is intended to honor. By articulating fundamental questions regarding the consciousness of legal structures and procedures, Tyler and Lind's work has served as a catalyst within the field. Their research employs the distinctive methodological and conceptual tools of social psychology. Yet even scholars who do not share their social psychological perspective have profitably appropriated their conceptual and analytic innovations. Our understanding of justice as an empirical concept has been forever altered by their work. |
|
1999 |
(co-winner)
Martha L. Fineman |
For her intellectual leadership in the study of gender, law, and the family. Her empirical examination of the legal and social work discourses applied in custory cases to critique "equality"-based reforms and her subsequent work on the discourses through which welfare and single mothers are represented within legal and political frames have been provocative and powerful, as have her theoretical proposals, based on empirical research, for re-envisioning the role of law in families and marriage |
| (co-winner)
Joel F. Handler |
For outstanding research contributions spanning three decades. In focusing on "social reform groups" Handler has taken up significant theoretical questions about relational dynamics – of the individual to the group, and of groups to the state. He is a leading scholar on poverty, welfare, and the state. The wide reach of his work is demonstrated by the substantial attention it has achieved in the fields of political sociology, political science, social work, public policy, education, and law, as well as in sociolegal studies. | |
|
1997 |
(co-winner)
Richard Lempert |
For work that exemplifies the finest in sociological research on informal justice. In his careful field work and analysis, he has significantly contributed to our understanding of the uses of discretion, the influence of legal counsel, and the role of cultural differences in the interpretation of meaningful explanations. He has also made important contributions in recent social scientific writing and in his widely used and respected volume, An Invitation to Law and Social Science: Deserts, Disputes and Distribution. |
| (co-winner)
Austin Sarat |
For his major contributions to the field of sociolegal research by combining careful empirical and conceptual work on violence and the law in its varied forms; and for his intellectual leadership in introducing new methodologies and traditions of scholarship to the law and sociology field. | |
|
1995 |
(co-winners)
Stewart Macaulay
|
Each is a major figure whose separate work has brought important currents into law and society in its formative period and helped configure the field, and who have each continued to make substantial and original contributions. Each, also, is an individual whose intellectual versatility and energy have contributed to the interdisciplinary dialogue at the core of the law and society enterprise. |
|
1993 |
Marc Galanter | For his landmark empirical studies of law and social change in India and equally impressive empirical studies in the United States, most recently focusing on large American law firms, resulting in (with Thomas Palay, 1991) Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm. |
|
1992 |
Lawrence Friedman | For his prolific writing and empirical studies, past and recent, that have touched many of the major themes in the law and society movement and for the influence on scholars in the law and society community of his ideas, values and dedication. |
|
1989 |
Richard Abel | In recognition of his extensive body of comparative work on the legal profession; his research on lawyers is a distinguished and influential example of the best in research on law and society |
|
1987 |
(co-winners)
John Heinz and Edward Lauman
|
For the quality of empirical work and rigorous analysis demonstrated in Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar. |
| (co-winners)
David Baldus, Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth
|
For the quality of work directed to significant issues of social and legal policy in a series of articles that analyze death penalty sentencing patterns in a systematic way. | |
|
1983 |
Hans Ziesel | For his major contribution to the literature of law and society and his work with Kalven on The American Jury |