Prizes and Awards

Herbert M. Kritzer
University of Minnesota

Herbert (Bert) Kritzer has made extraordinary contributions to empirical sociolegal scholarship and the application of empirical knowledge to real-world legal problems. 

Trained as a political scientist, Professor Kritzer joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1977, spending three decades there, with affiliations in Political Science and the Law School, and with stints as director of the Legal Studies Program, director of the Data and Computation Center, and chair of the Department of Political Science. Following two years as Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Empirical Study of Legal Practice at the William Mitchell College of Law, Kritzer moved to the University of Minnesota where he was the Marvin J. Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Law School and was an affiliated professor in Political Science. Kritzer is author, coauthor, or coeditor of 12 books and over 100 research articles. He also served as general editor of a remarkable resource for comparative and international study, the four-volume encyclopedia Legal Systems of the World, which includes detailed overviews of legal topics and summaries of the diverse legal systems of the world’s countries.  

Early in his professional life, Kritzer brought his empirical research strengths to issues that he has continued to examine throughout his career: civil litigation, the work of lawyers, judicial selection and the role of politics in law. His research often combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies, such as archival research, surveys, interviews, and observational studies.  

He was one of the contributors to the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP) at the University of Wisconsin that jump-started multi-methodological research in dispute resolution. CLRP examined how individuals reacted to and attempted to resolve their grievances, and analyzed the impact of lawyers and the courts on the resolution of disputes. Kritzer followed that influential work with additional fruitful collaborations comparing claiming and disputing processes in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.   

His award-winning scholarship on the work lives of lawyers has included Let’s Make a Deal: Negotiation and Settlement in Ordinary Litigation (co-winner of the 1993 C. Herman Pritchett Award for the best book on law and the courts, from the Law and Courts section, American Political Science Association) as well as empirical projects on legal advocacy, contingency fee legal practice and legal malpractice.  

His research and writing on judicial selection, including important studies of the elections of state supreme court justices and systematic analyses of other judicial selection approaches, have underscored the ubiquitous and powerful role of politics in determining who will decide legal disputes in the nation’s courts. 

Finally, Kritzer’s deployment of empirical methods in his own work, and his reflections on the benefits and limitations of empirical approaches to the study of law and legal processes, have guided so many other sociolegal scholars embarking on empirical study of law.  

He edited LSA’s flagship journal, the Law & Society Review, for four years (2004-2007). His stellar service as LSR editor and in other roles, along with his significant contributions to the development of the field of law and society, were acknowledged with a well-deserved Legacy Award in 2019. He was also LSA’s 2015 Ronald Pipkin Service Award winner.

Elizabeth Mertz
American Bar Foundation & University of Wisconsin

Empirical legal scholarship owes an enormous debt to Elizabeth Mertz, a groundbreaking anthropologist whose vast oeuvre makes a compelling case that the key to law is, above all, language. Her ethnographic research, including a landmark study of the first-year law school classroom, has modeled an invaluable approach to the social dynamics of legal pedagogy, bringing the texture of everyday speech to the complex and abstract process of learning to “think like a lawyer.” This study, The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (Oxford University Press, 2007) was co-winner of the Law & Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize and drew national attention to problems of privilege in legal pedagogy.

Across her articles and books, Mertz shows convincingly that qualitative research is an essential part of sociolegal scholarship. In her work, she shifts between the macro- and micro- to enhance our understanding of how practices of social discrimination not only affect legal actors but indeed shape them as such from the earliest stages of a legal education. Her research also examines the challenges that attend interdisciplinary translation, as well as the unique opportunities that lie in using social science to inform and improve legal processes. Again and again, Mertz has shown how fine-grained contextual analysis attuned to social context can inform the generalizations scholars can make in quantitative empirical work.

Beyond winning a broad readership for her innovative research, Mertz has created countless opportunities for sociolegal scholars through the establishment of a “New Legal Realism” movement and associated Collaborative Research Network. This initiative has generated edited volumes and symposia, and created a wonderful community for sociolegal scholars. With a view to the wider world, she also co-organized LSA’s International Research Collaborative on International Legal Education.

Mertz has been recognized for her mentorship of junior scholars. In 2015, she became the first professor from the University of Wisconsin Law School to receive the Doris Slesinger Award for Excellence in Mentoring. Mertz’s support of early career scholars has been a hallmark of her imprint on LSA, where she has held leadership positions at every level.

Her impact on law schools has been no less significant. Mertz has made important contributions to the debate over whether and how interdisciplinary sociolegal studies can be recognized in the metrics that affect law school rankings and in law school hiring and promotion. This effort, as well as her broader commitment to ethnographic legal research, has made her indispensable not only to LSA but also the American Association of Law Schools and Association for Political and Legal Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association. Here too she has offered guidance and support to a growing group of junior colleagues making incredible contributions to legal academia.

In recognition of Mertz’s work on law and language, she was elected a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and selected as a Fellow of Princeton University’s Program in Law & Public Affairs. She has also served as Editor of Law & Social Inquiry and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Reuben Jonathan Miller
University of Chicago & the American Bar Foundation

Taking home the Herbert Jacob Book Prize for new, outstanding work in law and society scholarship was Reuben Jonathan Miller of the University of Chicago and the American Bar Foundation. His book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (Little, Brown and Company, 2022) is a trenchant analysis of the long shadow of the criminal legal system in America. It provides an account of the afterlife of imprisonment. Miller draws on his experience as a volunteer chaplain at Chicago’s Cook county jail, as well as interviews and observations with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, and his personal family experience to paint a moving portrait of the enduring effects of incarceration, long after individuals are physically released from prison.

Honorable Mention

Poulami Roychowdhury – McGill University

Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Spencer Headworth – Purdue University

Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen – University of California, Irvine

Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Gregory Ablavsky
Stanford University

Gregory Ablavsky’s Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a substantial and consequential work of legal history. Its task is monumental: to explain the growth of federal authority in the first two U.S. federal territories, the Northwest and Southwest Territories. The book is ambitious: the geography it covers is massive; the source-base, which ranges from congressional debates and federal statutes to the paperwork of everyday governance such as deeds and surveys, is expansive. But it is its underlying questions that are most ambitious: what exactly is federal power, and who are its architects? His answer is surprising.

This is a story of practical governance; while the Washington administration, Congress, federal officials, land office administrators, and other federal bureaucrats sought to assert their vision of federal power over the West, the land they sought to govern and transform was far from empty. Those residents, including a wide range of Native peoples, French fur traders and villagers, and Anglo-American settlers and land speculators had conflicting views about how this vast land should be owned, organized, protected, and governed. And in their conflicts and negotiations with federal officials, each exploited federal power for their own gain and in the process influenced the shape governmental power would take. Governance, then, was not always predicable or straightforward, and federal authority was as much the product of the claims and actions of the diverse territorial inhabitants as it was the product of a well-laid out plan. Ablavsky, therefore, forces us to reconsider what we mean by “federal” and what we mean by “power.” The committee found the book particularly admirable for showing how the federal government can be studied, not as a monolith, but as the outcome of many different struggles playing out at grass-roots levels.  

Honorable Mention

Nada Moumtaz  – University of Toronto

God’s Property: Islam, Charity and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021)

Rachel E. López
Drexel University

Terrell Carter
Social Justice Activist

Kempis “Ghani” Songster
Healing Futures Restorative Justice Diversion Program

The LSA Article Prize was awarded to Terrell Carter, Rachel López & Kempis “Ghani” Songster for their article, “Redeeming Justice,” which appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review in 2021. The article explores life sentences without parole (LWOP) through the lens of a legal right to redemption, arguing that this right is embedded in the Eighth Amendment through the concept of human dignity. The article is a collaboration between human rights scholar Professor López and activists Carter, who is currently on his 29th year of a LWOP prison sentence and Songster, who was sentenced to LWOP as a juvenile and served 30 years in prison before being resentenced and released pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama. “Redeeming Justice” analyzes both the legal contradictions and human toll of LWOP sentences and foregrounds voices that are frequently marginalized, not just in society, but in scholarship as well.

Honorable Mention

Ya-Wen Lei – Harvard University

“Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China’s Platform Economy” Ya-Wen Lei. American Sociological Review (2021)

Frank Edwards
Rutgers University

Theresa Rocha Beardall
University of Washington

Theresa Rocha Beardall (University of Washington) and Frank R. Edwards (Rutgers University) are Assistant Professors of Sociology. Their paper, “Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare” is an empirical study of forced separation of Native children and the failed legacy of the landmark Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA). Drawing on theories of settler colonialism, the authors skillfully illuminate the legal separation of Native children as a perniciously ongoingracial project of a white supremacist settler-state. By empirically documenting ongoing dissolution of Native families and communities, Beardall and Edwards’ research presents a persuasive case for the abolition of the post-ICWA child welfare system. Such transformative action, the authors show, also requires the immediate redirection of financial resources to Native families and tribal nations. This article is a novel contribution to important sociolegal debates in race and law and demonstrates the importance of scholarship focused on an understudied group, the subordination of which has not always been considered through the lens of racialization.

Honorable Mention

Robin Walker Sterling – Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

Robin W. Sterling, “Through a Glass, Darkly: Systemic Racism, Affirmative Action, and Disproportionate Minority Contact,” 120 Mich. L. Rev. 451 (2021).

Steven Schaaf
University of Mississippi

This year’s Dissertation Prize went to Steven Schaaf of University of Mississippi. His paper, “Litigating the Authoritarian State: Legal Mobilization and Judicial Politics in the Middle East,” uses a theory of “lawful resistance” to explain when, how, and to what effect citizens access legal institutions and seek to hold authoritarian states accountable to the rule of law. The dissertation offers an impressive mixed-methods study of lawful resistance that includes multiple, novel data sources, and it offers several theoretical contributions to the literature. It takes on an important, timely topic about why and how people mobilize the law to resist authoritarian states. It advances the argument with wide-ranging implications for studies of courts and judicial politics that go well-beyond the study and the discipline in which it is situated.

Nafay Choudhury
Harvard Law School & University of Cambridge

Nafay Choudhury’s paper “Order in the Bazaar: The Transformation of Nonstate Law in Afghanistan’s Premier Money Exchange Market” (written as a PhD student at King’s College London Dickson Poon School of Law) is based on his previous experience of living and teaching law in Afghanistan for five years. This paper demonstrates that even in Afghanistan under circumstances of immense uncertainty and insecurity, remarkable legal transformation can be found at the interface of state and nonstate legal systems. The study shows a unique situation where money exchangers have been able to maintain an independent nonstate legal system in their market by borrowing legal structures from the state and formalizing their affairs. The paper is conceptually refined, ethnographically informed and methodologically distinctive. Moreover, its findings are likely to add to a growing body of law and society research that seeks to understand how communities in different contexts are able to regulate their affairs with little reliance on the law.

Abbey Hackleman
Purdue University

Abbey Hackleman’s paper, “Functional Confinement,” takes the reader through a sociolegal analysis of two major transitions in mental health policy in the United States. First, Hacklman summarizes the transition from the neglect of those with mental illness in prisons and almshouses at the turn of the 19th century to open psychiatric hospitals. Detailing the mistreatment in these hospitals and the profound restrictions on civil liberties, the author goes on to analyze the closing of these institutions in conjunction with President Johnson’s “war on crime” starting in 1963. Hackelman’s paper is a careful analysis of federal policy makers between the 1960s and 1980s demonstrating how public demand and fiscal austerity worked to confine the mentally ill to prisons. Using both primary and secondary historical sources of the time period, the paper shows that deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration are co-constituted. The author concludes with a convincing argument that failure to apply a sociolegal historical analysis to these problems will lead to continued failure to address the problems of mental illness in the United States.

Nicola Lacey
London School of Economics

This year’s International Prize was awarded to Nicola Lacey of the London School of Economics. Professor Lacey transformed the fields of critical criminology and penology and opened up new areas of inquiry and advocacy for reforming criminal justice systems around the globe. Her work advanced sociolegal scholarship in these key areas. Professor Lacey has also made significant contributions to feminist legal-thought and has written/co-edited 11 books.

Calvin Morrill
University of California, Berkeley

Calvin Morrill is Stefan A. Riesenfeld Professor of Law and Sociology in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley, following positions in Sociology departments at University of the Arizona and University of California, Irvine. Professor Morrill has served as Associate Dean and Chair of JSP and Legal Studies since 2013, which means that he has long been an institutional leader in graduate sociolegal studies. He teaches research methods along with other courses on legal sociology, for which he has won numerous teaching awards. He was a collaborative leader in making the West Coast Law and Society Retreat a forum for sociolegal graduate students for a number of years. Dr. Morrill has served on an astounding 44 Ph.D. supervisory committees and chaired over half (24) of them–many of these also entailed MA level supervision. Many of the PhDs he has supervised have co-authored publications with him, and many have gone on to become leading researchers, teachers, and public intellectuals affiliated with the Law and Society Association.

Students and colleagues of Dr. Morrill have been effusive in their praise of his commitments to and achievements in mentoring. Many features of these letters deserve attention for how they capture the outstanding involvement of him as a mentor. For one thing, former students extol Cal’s “uncanny ability to push each of us beyond our current thinking and help us find the hidden capacity we each have within.” He is known for his advice in helping students to overcome the familiar “imposter’s syndrome” and to gain confidence to move forward. Testimonies on this point include many examples of him assisting students in times of crisis.

Elizabeth Mertz
American Bar Foundation & University of Wisconsin

Elizabeth Mertz is very well known among sociolegal scholars for her commitment to legal education. She is a Senior Research Faculty member at the American Bar Foundation and Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Wisconsin. Even though she has not worked for most of her career in a PhD generating institution, she has distinguished herself by mentoring a long line of students working on Ph.D., SJD, LLM, and senior honors theses at multiple universities along with a host of post-doctoral fellows and visiting scholars at the ABF. Notably, she has championed the contributions of women, Black, Indigenous and scholars of color while maintaining a vigorous agenda of her own award-winning scholarship. Her distinctive research addresses a variety of issues in law school education, with a focus on law, language, and qualitative social science.

Professor Mertz is a leader of the innovative New Legal Realism project, which has profoundly reshaped interdisciplinary sociolegal research and influenced increasing numbers of scholars at all levels, including graduate and junior as well as senior scholars. She also has generated a number of large grants aiming to fund research and support creative law school education. All these efforts won her the Association for Women Lawyers Mentoring Award in 2016 as well as the Doris Slesinger Award for Excellence in Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin. Her students describe her as an “inspiring” and “proactive” mentor who encourages innovative sociolegal research, assists her mentees at every level of research development and publication, and employs her extensive professional networks to amplify the impact of their scholarship. Many letters note that Mertz is a long-term mentor who continues to provide support for many years during the professional lives of once-students.

Annie Bunting
York University

Annie Bunting is Professor of Law & Society at York University in Toronto, Canada, researching and teaching in the areas of social justice and human rights. Her service to LSA over many years has been nothing less than extraordinary. Professor Bunting was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2013-2016. In addition to helping steer LSA through difficult times of administrative transition, she has served tirelessly on many committees championing the leadership and participation of women and minority scholars in the Association. She served as Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2018 joint meeting of LSA and the Canadian Law and Society Association. Other committee service includes the Program Committee (2002, 2008, 2012), 50th Anniversary Committee, International Scholarship Prize Committee, Stan Wheeler Prize Committee, Co-Chair of the Governance Committee, and most recently she served on the International Activities Committee.

Javier A. Couso
Universidad Diego Portales & Utrecht University

Javier A. Couso is Professor of Public Law at Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) and Professor of Law at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), with research and teaching expertise in constitutional law. In his service for LSA, he has been a leading member working for many years to promote international scholars and the global field of sociolegal scholarship more generally. He has served on numerous committees, including the International Activities Committee (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), the Graduate Student Workshop Committee, Nominating Committee, CRN Committee, and Co-chair or member of the Program Committee (2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2020). In all these efforts Professor Couso has served with gracious generosity and been attentive to scholars and their intellectual contributions from beyond the Euro-American academy.

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.