Prizes and Awards

Christopher Lawrence Tomlins – University of California, Berkeley

Christopher Lawrence (“Chris”) Tomlins (Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University, 1981; M.A. Johns Hopkins 1977, Oxford University, 1977, University of Sussex 1974; B.A. Oxford University 1973) is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law (Jurisprudence & Social Policy) where he has taught since 2014. Previous appointments include Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine (2009-2014), Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (1992-2009), where he remains a faculty affiliate, and La Trobe University, Melbourne (1980-1991). He has previously received the Association’s James Willard Hurst book prize (1994 and again in 2011). Other book and article prizes include the Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians (2021), the Richard Slatten Award of the Virginia Historical Society (2021), the John Phillip Reid Prize of the American Society for Legal History (2011), the Bancroft Prize of the trustees of Columbia University (2011), the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association (1994), and the Erwin W. Surrency Prize of the American Society for Legal History (1989). From 1995 to 2004 he served as editor of the Law & History Review, from 2005 to 2009 as Associate Editor and then Editor of Law & Social Inquiry, and from 2009 to 2014 as a member of the Editorial Committee of Annual Reviews of Law and Social Science. In 1994 he was the Founding Editor (with Arthur McEvoy) of Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society and continues to serve as the series’ Academic Editor. Since 2010 he has convened the “Law As …” occasional symposium series. His empirical research has ranged over half a millennium of Anglophone legal history (1500-2000); he also writes on the philosophy of legal history. His major works include In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (2020); Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (2010); Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); and The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (1985). He is editor/co-editor of nine other books, including (with Michael Grossberg) the three volume Cambridge History of Law in America. He is currently at work on The Rage of John Dos Passos. 

Michael McCann – University of Washington

Michael McCann is Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship Emeritus at the University of Washington. He was the leading architect of the Law, Societies, and Justice program as well as the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center at UW starting in the late 1990s; he served as Director of both for a decade, until 2011.  

McCann’s research focuses on the politics of rights-based struggles for social justice, with an emphasis on challenges to race, gender, and class hierarchies. He also was an important figure in the interpretive turn toward scholarly analysis of legal discourse as a constitutive form of power. McCann is author of over seventy-five article-length publications and author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of eight books, including authoring Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994) and (with William Haltom) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago, 2004); both books won multiple professional awards. His most recent book, with George Lovell, was titled Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalist Empire (Chicago, 2020).  

Michael was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008) and numerous NSF and other research grants; he was elected as president of the U.S based international Law and Society Association for 2011-13. Michael won a UW Distinguished Teaching Award (1989) and, in 2014, the Marsha Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award by the UW Graduate School as well as the Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award from the Law & Society Association.  

Ke Li – City University of New York – John Jay College

Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Ke Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. Her research focuses on law, legal professions, courts, and women’s rights in contemporary China. In recent years, Li has branched out into new research areas. In one project, she studies strategic litigation filed by Chinese LGBTQ groups. In another project, she analyzes the interplay of law, politics, and knowledge production through the lens of doctor-patient disputes in Chinese society. 

Honorable Mention

Randle C. DeFalco – University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law

Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Randle DeFalco is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s William S. Richardson School of Law. Randle’s research focuses on intersections between international criminal law and novel forms of mass harm causation, especially those involving slow or attritive forms of violence. Prior to joining Richardson, Randle was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool and a Rutgers Law Fellow. 

Jessica M Marglin – University of Southern California

The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022)

Jessica Marglin is Professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Matthias Lehmann, of Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020).  

Honorable Mention

Robert Travers  – Cornell University 

Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-93 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Robert Travers is Professor of History at Cornell University, where he has taught since 2005. He received his PhD from Cambridge University, and is the author of two books on the growth of the British Empire in eighteenth-century India: Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India. The British in Bengal 1757-1793 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India 1765-1793 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 

Fabio de Sa e Silva – University of Oklahoma

Fabio de Sa e Silva is Associate Professor of International Studies and the Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He studies the social organization and impact of law and lawyers in Brazil and comparatively. Currently, Fabio is one of the organizers of the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL), an LSA International Research Collaborative that is designing comparative research on how rising autocrats use law to amass power and what can be done to stop their moves. In this capacity, he also hosts the PAL Cast, a podcast series where he interviews lead scholars on law and (un)democratic politics. 

“Relational legal consciousness and anticorruption:
Lava Jato, social media interactions, and the co-production of law’s detraction in Brazil (2017–2019)” Law & Society Review, 2021

Emily Ryo – USC Gould School of Law

Emily Ryo is a professor of law and sociology at the USC Gould School of Law. She received a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research focuses on immigration enforcement, immigration detention, and access to justice for immigrants. Her work has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the American Bar Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among others. She has published widely in both leading sociology and law journals, including the American Sociological Review, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review.

Ian G Peacock – University of California, Los Angeles

Ian Peacock is a first-year law student and a Rubenstein Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. Before law school, Ian completed his undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ian has an ever-expanding set of research interests, but he has mostly written about organizational theory, administrative and judicial decision-making, criminal justice, and international migration law and policy. Ian’s research has appeared in law reviews such as Immigration and Nationality Law Review and Southern California Law Review. His work has also appeared in interdisciplinary law journals, including Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and Law & Society Review, and generalist social science journals including American Behavioral Scientist and Socius. 

“The Study of Pandemic and Stigma Effects in Removal Proceedings”. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2022)

Devon W Carbado – University of California, Los Angeles

The Honorable Harry Pregerson and Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, Professor Carbado earned his bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA and his Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. Professor Carbado has served as both an associate vice chancellor and an associate provost at UCLA.  His expertise traverses Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Anti-discrimination law.  His works include Race Law Stories, (Foundation Press, 2008) (with Rachel Moran), Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post Racial” America (Oxford University Press, 2013) (with Mitu Gulati),  The long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives (Beacon Press, 2012) (with Donald Weise), Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law (Cambridge, 2022) (with Bennett Capers, Robin Lenhardt, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig), and Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment (New Press, 2022). In addition to being twice elected Professor of the Year by graduating classes at UCLA School of Law and receiving the Law School’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, Professor Carbado has also received the university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching.  Professor Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which, modeled on the Guggenheim, is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. A former Vice Dean of the Law School, Professor Carbado has also taught at UC Berkeley School of Law and Harvard Law School. Part of the inaugural cohort of Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, Professor Carbado is currently a Global Atlantic Fellow and is working on a book tentatively title, Can the Black Body Speak? 

“Strict Scrutiny & The Black Body” UCLA Law Review (2022)

Dylan Farrell-Bryan – University of  Pennsylvania

“Bureaucracies of Removal: The Labor and Logics of Immigration Courts”

Dylan Farrell-Bryan completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on immigration and the administrative bureaucracy in US immigration courts. Her dissertation, “Bureaucracies of Removal: The Labor and Logics of Immigration Courts,” draws on in-depth interviews with court actors, including immigration judges, ICE prosecutors, and removal defense attorneys, to better understand the process of removal adjudication in the administrative state. Dylan’s prior work has been published in Law & Society Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Socius. Dylan is currently completing her J.D. at Yale Law School.  

Honorable Mention

Erdem Demirtaş – Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

“Constitutional Courts During Political Upheavals: The Case of the Turkish Constitutional Court”

Erdem Demirtaş holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. His research interests intersect constitutional theory and judicial politics, with a particular focus on the behavior of constitutional courts in unstable regimes. His dissertation examined the Turkish Constitutional Court’s response to successive episodes of political upheavals over the last six decades, analyzing how the court operates in the absence of clear signals from major political actors. His research involved qualitative methods, including constitutional ethnography of politically salient cases, process tracing, and in-depth interviews with judges. Dr. Demirtaş’s latest research project, “Topic Modelling of Court Judgements: Tracing Informal Constitutional Changes,” has received the European Commission’s Seal of Excellence under the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. 

Charlotte Rosen – Northwestern University

Charlotte Rosen is a historian of U.S. prisons and prisoner resistance, with a focus on the politics of prison overcrowding. In 2023, she received her PhD in History from Northwestern University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. You can find her work in The Journal of Policy History and The Journal of Urban History as well as in popular outlets such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and n+1. She is also a member of Study and Struggle, a collective concentrated in Mississippi that organizes toward abolition through political education, mutual aid, and community building across prison walls, and an academic tutor with Northwestern’s Prison Education Program.

Victoria Piehowski – University of Minnesota

Victoria Piehowski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Using qualitative methods, she studies change in the practices and policies of American punishment. Her scholarship asks three interrelated questions: How do penal actors craft and mobilize expertise—particularly over trauma and addiction— in the context of political conflict over law, crime, and victimization? How do penal actors intertwine care and punishment in the contemporary criminal legal system? And finally, what are the implications of using notions of illness to reshape political and institutional relationships with criminal justice? Her research includes Veterans Treatment Courts, community supervision/probation, domestic violence protective orders, and bail.

Shealyn Massey
University of California, Berkeley

Shealyn Massey (she/they) recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Legal Studies. Currently, they are living in New York and working as a paralegal for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. At Planned Parenthood, Shealyn assists attorneys in the Litigation and Law Department with federal and state litigation and policy work. She aspires to attend law school (and potentially other graduate programs) to continue serving her communities and fighting for liberation.  

Sharyn Roach Anleu – Flinders University of South Australia

Sharyn Roach Anleu BA (Hons) MA (Utas) LLB (Hons) (UAdel), PhD (Univ of Connecticut) is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Adelaide and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences.

Sharyn has made significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of law and society within Australia and internationally.  Her body of scholarly work focuses on two broad streams: legal professions, especially the recruitment and experience of women; and the interaction or interface between law and other modes of regulation.  Her major research contribution is the investigation of the everyday work, including the emotion work, of the judiciary.  Her excellence in law and society research is made possible by her distinctive combination of social science research methods, sociological concepts, and legal knowledge.

With Emerita Professor Kathy Mack she leads the Judicial Research Project at Flinders University which undertakes socio-legal research into the Australian judiciary and its courts. Their latest book is Judging and Emotion:  A Socio-Legal Analysis (Routledge 2021) and in 2018 Sharyn and Jessica Milner Davis co-edited Judges, Judging and Humour (Palgrave).

Honorable Mention

Jane McAdam – UNSW Law

Professor Jane McAdam AO BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) (Sydney) DPhil (Oxford) is Scientia Professor of Law and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. She has held visiting appointments at Oxford and Harvard, and was previously a non-resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at The Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Professor McAdam publishes widely in international refugee law and forced migration, with a particular focus on mobility in the context of climate change and disasters. Her legal analysis has been adopted by courts, governments and UN bodies and her work has been highly influential in the development of international, regional and national policy frameworks. In 2022, she was appointed to draft the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility, which is currently being deliberated by Pacific governments. Professor McAdam serves on a number of international committees, including the International Law Association’s Committee on International Law and Sea-Level Rise (as Co-Rapporteur until 2018); the Advisory Committee of the Platform on Disaster Displacement; the Technical Advisory Group for the Pacific Climate Change Migration and Human Security Programme; and the Advisory Council of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. In 2017, she received the Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for Human Rights for her work on refugees and forced migration. In 2021, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) ‘for distinguished service to international refugee law, particularly to climate change and the displacement of people’. In 2022, she received the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2022 Law Award. 

Angela Onwuachi-Willig – Boston University School of Law

A graduate of Grinnell College (B.A.), University of Michigan Law School (J.D.), and Yale University (Ph.D.), Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Dean and the Ryan Roth Gallo and Ernest J. Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law (BU Law). Before joining BU Law, she served as Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Law Institute, and College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Notably, she is the founder of the Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop, which has resulted in the production of many books and hundreds of articles and essays by its participants and has assisted dozens of women on the path to tenure and administrative leadership positions, and a co-founder of the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum, which seeks to provide junior scholars with commentary and critique and to provide scholars at all career stages the opportunity to engage with new scholarly currents and ideas. Dean Onwuachi-Willig is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Association of American Publishers Prose Prize (2023), SALT’s M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award (2022), the Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize (2022), the inaugural Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Impact Award (2021), the EXTRAordinary Woman in Boston Award (2019), the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize (2018), the University of Iowa Collegiate Teaching Award (2016), the AALS Clyde Ferguson Award (2015), the AALS Derrick Bell Award (2006), and the Gertrude Rush Award (2016). In 2017-2018, she served as the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation. Dean Onwuachi-Willig serves on the Law School Admissions Council Board, the Grinnell College Board of Trustees, and the AALS Deans Steering Committee; she is the Chair-Elect for the AALS Section for the Law Dean.

Heinz Klug – University of Wisconsin

Heinz Klug is John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Visiting Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Growing up in South Africa, he participated in the anti-apartheid struggle, spent 11 years in exile and returned to South Africa in 1990 as a member of the ANC Land Commission and researcher for the chairperson of the ANC Constitutional Committee. He served in the ANC political underground and Umkhonto we Sizwe and was a member of the Medu Art Ensemble in Botswana. He received his BA(Hons) from the University of Natal in 1978, a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989 and SJD from the University of Wisconsin in 1997. In 2013 he was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa from Hasselt University in Belgium. His books include Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa’s Political reconstruction (2000); and The Constitution of South Africa: A Contextual Analysis (2010). More recently he has co-edited two books on legal realism: The New Legal Realism: Studying Law Globally (2016) with Sally Engle Merry and a Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism with Shauhin Talesh and Elizabeth Mertz (2021).    

Rosann Greenspan
University of California-Berkeley

Rosann Greenspan is the former executive director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, with which she was affiliated for 20 years until her retirement in 2019. She has also held positions as research officer at the Law Reform Commission of Canada, postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, US Supreme Court fellow, research director at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC, and lecturer in Legal Studies at U.C. Berkeley, inter alia. Her most recent publication is the edited volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice: Studies Inspired by the Work of Malcolm Feeley, edited by Rosann Greenspan, Hadar Aviram and Jonathan Simon (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Dr. Greenspan graduated with her B.A. magna cum laude in Yale University’s first class of undergraduate women. She earned an M.A. from the Centre for Criminology at the University of Toronto, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program in U.C. Berkeley School of Law. Besides Ontario, where she returns regularly, she has also lived in Quebec and British Columbia, and briefly in the Yukon.

Mari Matsuda
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

From her earliest academic publications, Professor Matsuda has spoken from the perspective and increasingly used the method that has come to be known as critical race theory. She is not only one of its most powerful practitioners, but is among a handful of legal scholars credited with its origin. Her first article, “Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted Visions of Human Nature,” published in 1986, boldly—albeit respectfully—took on liberal legal philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice and in doing so announced her own philosophical orientation. Matsuda concludes her piece with an idea that informs much of her work in subsequent years: “There is, as Rawls suggests, a place called Justice, and it will take many voices to get there.” The voices she has in mind are the voices that have been left out, “outsider” voices speaking as individuals and as members of their communities of origin, voices of subordinate peoples. Voices from the bottom, Matsuda believes—and critical race theory posits—have the power to open up new legal concepts of even constitutional dimension. Paradoxically, bringing in the voices of outsiders has helped to make Matsuda’s work central to the legal canon. A Yale Law School librarian ranked three of her publications as among the “top 10 most cited law review articles” for their year of publication. Judges and scholars regularly quote her work.

Louise Trubek
University of Wisconsin Law School

Louise G. Trubek is an Emerita Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the Yale Law School, Louise is an active scholar in the fields of public interest law around the world, social justice advocacy, clinical legal education and the legal profession. Her scholarship and teaching also includes studies of regulation and governance in the European Union and the United States. Louise’s current research includes co-editing with Scott Cummings and Fabio Sa e Silva a book on the pro-bono movement worldwide: Global Pro Bono: Causes, Consequences and Contestation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). She also co-authored with Prof. Luz Herrera “The Emerging Legal Architecture for Social Justice” published in 44 NYU Rev. L & Soc. Change 355 (2020). Other publications in the field include “Social Justice Advocacy and Innovation: The Wisconsin Center for Public Representation 1974-Present” and “Transformations in Health Law Practice: The Intersection of Changes in Healthcare and Legal Workplaces” (with Barbara Zabawa and Paula Galowitz).

Charles Lawrence 
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Professor Lawrence joined the William S. Richardson School of Law in 2008 from Georgetown. He began his teaching career at the University of San Francisco in 1974, was a tenured professor at Stanford and Georgetown, and has visited several other schools, including Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Southern California. Professor Lawrence is best known for his prolific work in antidiscrimination law, equal protection, and critical race theory. His most recent book, We Won’t Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), was co-authored by Professor Mari Matsuda. Professor Lawrence received the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Most Distinguished Professor Award; the John Bingham Hurlburt Award for Excellence in Teaching, presented by the 1990 graduating class of Stanford Law School; and the Society of American Law Teachers national teaching award. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Haverford College, Georgetown University, most recently, In December of 2019, he also received an honorary Doctorate from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. He served as a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education and on many other public interest boards.

Setsuo Miyazawa
UC Hastings Law

Setsuo Miyazawa is a legal sociologist who received LL.B., LL.M., and S.J.D. from Hokkaido University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale. Professor Miyazawa has a wide range of research interests, including police and criminal justice, legal ethics and public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice; he received his doctoral degree in Japan with a study on police, while receiving his American doctoral degree with a study on corporate legal departments. He has published or edited more than a dozen books in Japanese and English. His first English book, Policing in Japan (SUNY Press, 1992), received the 1993 Distinguished Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. He has also been active in the Law and Society Association (LSA) in the US, twice serving on its Board of Trustees. He co-founded the Collaborative Research Network 33 in East Asian Law and Society in the LSA in 2008 and received the International Scholarship Prize from the LSA in 2014. He co-founded the Section on East Asian Law and Society in the AALS in 2015 and the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) in 2016. He was the founding President of the ALSA in 2016 and 2017.