Prizes and Awards

Joachim J. Savelsberg 
University of Minnesota

The Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize for empirical scholarship and the advancement of research in law and society went to Joachim J. Savelsberg of the University of Minnesota. Savelsberg serves as a professor of sociology and, by courtesy, law and holder of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair.

Professor Savelsberg has been a life-long sociolegal scholar, holding research positions all around the world. Described as an “intellectual pioneer” in the field, he has written eight books and over 100 articles and essays, many of which have been featured in law and society research venues. Professor Savelsberg’s research seeks to understand the place of law in addressing and remembering mass violence, atrocities and the need for transitional justice.

He was born in Germany in 1951, where he was raised and educated. In 1989, after post-doctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities, Savelsberg joined the sociology faculty at Minnesota. He was a visiting professor or research fellow in Austria (KFU Graz), Germany (Humboldt U, KHK Bonn, LMU Munich), Italy (Rockefeller Bellagio), France (IEA-Paris), and South Africa (STIAS). He served as chair of the sections for Sociology of Law and for Human Rights of the American Sociological Association. Earlier work is on the criminalization of young immigrants, white-collar crime legislation, sentencing guidelines, the sociology of criminology, and comparative criminal punishment. In the 2000s, his focus turned to issues of mass violence and genocide. Recent books include American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (with Ryan D. King) (Russell Sage Foundation 2011), Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur (University of California Press 2015 [paperback and open access online]) and Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles (University of California Press 2021 [paperback and open access online]).

Arzoo Osanloo 
University of Washington

The Herbert Jacob Book Prize went to Arzoo Osanloo of the University of Washington. Her book, Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran (Princeton University Press, 2020) is the first to consider the social reality of the Islamic mandate of mercy and, at the same time, it explores a criminal justice system that prioritizes victims’ rights. The book contributes to sociolegal debates in Islamic law, criminal law and restorative justice. It offers reflections on anti-death penalty studies and human rights, as well as mercy and humanitarianism.

Osanloo presents an unprecedented view of the death penalty in Iran, where Islamic law gives the sole right of retribution in homicide cases to victims’ families. In these “crimtort” cases—investigated and prosecuted by the state—punishment is meted out through a private proceeding in which the victims’ families can ask for the death penalty or choose to forgive, sparing the perpetrator’s life. How parties reach this decision operates through a process mediated by a “cottage industry” of social workers, activist lawyers, judges, artists, and families, all engaged in “forgiveness work.” Providing a transformative law-in-action perspective based on years of ethnographic study, Osanloo reveals how localized rules and customs interact with the formal legal field to produce multilayered normative systems that shape how families arrive at mercy. Through path-breaking engagement with theories of legal pluralism, Osanloo dispels any notion that post-revolutionary Iran is a purely Islamic republic embracing state-enforced religious criminal law, demonstrating how the updated Iranian criminal code, implemented by state-appointed and religiously trained criminal law judges, merges Shari’a with Western inspired, codified criminal code–revealing a system that is in many ways more humane than its Western counterparts.

Honorable Mention

Sarah Brayne – University of Texas at Austin

Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Sarah Esther Lageson – Rutgers University

Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Samuel Fury Childs Daly 
Duke University

Samuel Fury Childs Daly of Duke University took home the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize for the best sociolegal history book. His book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point—the courtroom. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, the book describes how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the long involvement of crime that followed.

Daly shows how crime in post-civil war Nigeria roots in the civil war which led people to engage in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. In historicizing crime, Daly also tells the story of the creation and disappearance of Biafra, a state designed to promote “law and order”. As Daly describes, Biafra was only accepted by a few peer nations as an independent state. In turn, Daly’s history complicates how we should approach histories of international law and statehood. He is critical of the impulse to see histories of international institutions as if these histories are “synonymous” with histories of Africa. His book advocates for exemplifies how to do an “internal” history. His rich archival work and oral history provides a way forward for future scholarship in this area.

Honorable Mention

Durba Mitra   – Harvard University

Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Rachel E. Stern
University of California-Berkeley

Lawrence J. Liu
University of California-Berkeley & Yale Law School

The LSA Article Prize was awarded to University of California-Berkeley Professor Rachel E. Stern and Lawrence J. Liu (JD/PhD student at UC-Berkeley and Yale Law School) for their article, “The Good Lawyer: State-Led Professional Socialization in Contemporary China,” which appeared in Law & Social Inquiry in February, 2020.

Stern and Liu provide an incisive analysis of the role of the legal profession in China in the twenty-first century. They highlight that challenges that attorneys in China face, particularly when they are involved in politically sensitive litigation. Based on original data sets of lawyers and numerous in-depth interviews, Stern and Liu offer a nuanced interpretation of different segments of the bar. The study shifts attention away from the politicization of courts to the co-optation of attorneys in authoritarian regimes. Their thoughtful investigation identifies the ways in which the Chinese state exerts pressure on attorneys to conform to the rules of the game, i.e., the criteria for being a “good lawyer” and inculcate loyalty. Through their careful consideration of socialist law in practice, Stern and Liu demonstrate the importance of contextual, historically situated analysis. They show how the state coerces lawyers to separate their private beliefs from their public behavior. To flourish, attorneys must accept a more incremental approach to change, which requires optimism. Their brilliant insights show that a more careful investigation of subgroups with the legal profession is needed; what Stern and Liu call “varieties of legal professionalism.” They show the need for documenting a wider range of socialization strategies. Drawing on previous studies of legal mobilization, the role of law in fragile states, law and emotions, and empirical studies of the legal profession in various countries, this interdisciplinary study is an exemplar of sociolegal scholarship. This original consideration of “legal activism under authoritarianism” will inspire others to take a global approach of the study of legal institutions.

Kara W. Swanson
Northeastern University

Combining history and Critical Race Theory, Kara Swanson’s article, “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” repositions the 1858 opinion of the United States Attorney General opinion, “Invention of a Slave” declaring inventions by African Americans, enslaved and free, unpatentable. Within a few years, legal changes that abolished the law of slavery rendered the opinion obsolete, and it became forgotten, dropped from legal memory but Swanson calls for readers to remember the legal story and argues that law’s selective memory has carried a cost. She excavates the generations of African American activists who researched and wrote about the opinion and its backstory of an enslaved blacksmith who invented an innovative plow. Setting these storytellers in the context of post-Emancipation advocacy for the “rights of belonging,” Swanson demonstrates the political stakes of their efforts in the relationship among inventive ability, patents, and citizenship. She also reflects on her first encounters with Invention of a Slave as an obscure part of the antebellum past and on the new perspective gained from this history of remembering. She argue that these stakes persist, making this story part of the living present of race and law. She uses personal storytelling to consider the costs of legal forgetting and the possibilities of mitigation both in this case study, her essay has implications for the patent system and our ongoing national conversation about paths to citizenship, and in the broader projects of curating law’s memory and fulfilling law’s formal promises of racial equality.

Honorable Mention

Deborah N. Archer – NYU School of Law

“White Men’s Roads through Black Men’s Homes: Advancing Racial Equity through Highway Construction” 73 Vanderbilt L. Rev. 1259 (2020)

I. India Thusi – Delaware Law School

“On Beauty and Policing,” 114 Northwestern University L.Rev. 1335 (2020)

Tobias Smith
University of California-Berkeley

Tobias Smith’s dissertation, “The Contradictions of Chinese Capital Punishment,” explores a common law and society argument: what drives the development of death penalty law and its application? He interviews dozens of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and other experts across four Chinese provinces in an incredibly political-sensitive field of law.

For many fields, a comparison of the People’s Republic of China and the United States might seem obvious. In the field of comparative judicial politics, however, the comparison of these two juggernauts appears at first glance to be an odd choice: an authoritarian court system often seen as a tool of the party-state paired with an independent judiciary that acts as a check on elected officials. Smith leverages this odd juxtaposition to maximum effect. Smith’s conclusions, however, are far from obvious. His dissertation demonstrates that indicators of liberalization and of moves toward abolition in the US, when seen in China, are in fact evidence of the party-state’s increasingly adroit control of governmental elites. Reform, yes; liberalization, no. Smith’s important historical and theoretical contributions should not distract, however, from the impressive methodological achievement that this research represents. Given the PRC’s increasingly authoritarian turn, this work represents an empirical undertaking that is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

Edward van Daalen
University of Genève

Edward Van Daalen engages in field work across four continents and in multiple languages in his dissertation titled, “Decolonizing the Global Child Labor Regime: The ILO, Trade Unions, and Organized Working Children.” Van Daalen’s treatment of the global child labour regime is a masterly decentering of a seemingly well-known history. The author examines the development of the child labour regime over the course of a century and a half, complicating our understanding of child labour restrictions as based in fundamental human rights. Van Daalen accomplishes this by focusing on the least powerful actors involved in this history: those working children whom the regime purports to protect. The author demonstrates how these children often worked in resistance to organized labor and Western corporate interests in a dynamic involving both developed and developing states and societies. The result is an empirically rich, highly readable account of a regime with colonialist roots previously unexamined at this level of nuance. Methodologically, Van Daalen draws on an impressively broad reservoir of grey literature to identify important cases and actors, and then engages in field work on no fewer than four continents and in multiple languages. Moreover, the writing was a step above what one expects in a dissertation; the author tells a story on every page and draws the reader into an increasingly sophisticated interweaving of theoretically driven historical threads. The product is sweeping in scope, changing our understanding of an important global institutional framework.

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.

Raika Kim
University of California-Berkeley

Raika Kim’s paper, “The Ability to Work: Perspectives of Workers with Disabilities,” is a rigorously conceived and carefully executed study of the experiences of workers with disabilities. Through ten insightful interviews, Kim extends the literature showing that people with disabilities understand and experience their disabilities in a range of ways that do not necessarily match legal definitions. She traces how her interviewees learned about their legal rights, and the different ways they mobilize those rights at work–or don’t. Kim shows that most of her participants view the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) primarily through the lens of workplace accommodations, and they are less aware of its other provisions. They also face many obstacles in requesting accommodations, such as stigma. In one of Kim’s most interesting findings, she shows that many interviewees were more likely to request accommodations when they felt they needed them in order to be productive employees. Kim argues that the structure of the ADA limits its effectiveness by putting the onus on the worker to request protections, and she calls for a more proactive legal approach that instead puts the onus on employers. Working under difficult pandemic conditions, Kim nonetheless achieved a deep rapport with her interviewees and a high level of polish in her final written product. She is a richly deserving winner of this year’s Undergraduate Student Paper Prize.

In the summer of 2019, Raika had been working as an intern at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) when she suffered her first seizure and was ultimately diagnosed with generalized convulsive epilepsy. While she was aware of her rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) thanks to the training at the EEOC, Raika knew most others did not have the same privilege. This ignited her passion for disability law, eventually leading her to write a thesis on how California workers with disabilities negotiate their rights in the workplace. Since graduating from U.C. Berkeley, Raika has been working as a paralegal at a local employment and civil rights law firm, and hopes to attend law school in the near future to pursue a career in disability rights advocacy.

Rachel Sieder
Centre for Research and Advanced Study in Social Anthropology

This year’s International Prize was awarded to Rachel Sieder — a senior research professor at the Centre for Research and Advanced Study in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She also is an associate researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute’s Centre for Law and Social Transformation in Bergen, Norway. A leading scholar in the study of legal pluralism and the judicialization of politics, she has contributed significantly to the understanding of indigenous rights and the relation between indigenous legal systems and state law, particularly in Central America. Professor Sieder has led numerous collaborative law and society research projects, bringing together scholars from the global south and north, including a CRN on Sexual and Reproductive Rights Lawfare in Latin America, and currently an IRC Pluriland: Theorizing Conflict and Contestation in Plural Land Rights Regimes. Professor Sieder is widely published in both English and Spanish and has benefitted the international law and scholarship community as a mentor, editor and organizer.

Setsuo Miyazawa 
UC Hastings Law

UC Hastings Law professor Setsuo Miyazawa earned two LSA awards this year, as he was chosen for the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award and was also one of five Legacy Award winners. Professor Miyazawa, a former student of the late Stan Wheeler at Yale, has played a vital role in encouraging young Japanese scholars to learn about American law in the U.S., while also sending American students to Japan to conduct research. He is known for taking these same students—almost by hand—and introducing them to various well-known scholars in LSA who shared their research interests. Many of these students are now eminent scholars in the sociolegal field.

Professor Miyazawa is the first Asian scholar to receive the Wheeler Award. He was also the recipient of LSA’s International Prize in 2014 and served twice on the LSA Board of Trustees. Professor Miyazawa has been active in LSA initiatives, having co-founded the Collaborative Research Network on East Asian Law and Society (CRN 33) in 2008, which is now one of the largest CRNs. He was the founding President of the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) in 2016 and is currently the President of the Asian Criminological Society.

Nancy Reichman
University of Denver

The Ronald Pipkin Service Award for sustained and extraordinary service to the Association was given to Nancy Reichman of the University of Denver. Over the course of her career, Nancy has taken on extensive service roles for LSA. Early in her career (1992-1994) she served as Associate Editor of the Law & Society Review. She also was a member of the LSA Board of Trustees (1990-1992) and held the LSA Secretary position from 2005-2007. In addition to serving as chair of the 1989 Program Committee, co-chairing the Program Committee (2010) and chairing the Nominations Committee (2013), Reichman has served countless times as a discussant or chair for various panels at Annual Meetings. Professor Reichman also played a pivotal role in the Association’s recent Executive Office transition. She chaired both the LSA Transition Planning Committee (2013) and the Executive Officer Search Committee in 2015.

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.