Graduate Student Paper Competition
The editors of Law & Social Inquiry are pleased to announce our annual competition for the best journal-length paper in the field of law and social science written by a graduate or law student. Law & Social Inquiry publishes empirical and theoretical studies of sociolegal processes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Entries have closed on this year's competition. Please stay tuned for next year's competition.
LSI invites direct submissions from graduate and law students and nominations of student work from faculty. The author must be a graduate student or law student at the time the paper was written and when submitted. Faculty nominations should include a short description along with the paper and contact details for the student. Submissions will be evaluated by our editors. The winning submission will be sent to selected scholars for advisory reviews to aid with revisions prior to publication. All submissions (direct and faculty nominated) are weighted equally in the competition. The winning paper will be published in Law & Social Inquiry and the author(s) will receive a total cash prize of $500 (US).
Please send your article as a Microsoft Word document to lsi-abf@abfn.org. Please indicate that (1) you intend to be considered in the competition, (2) you are currently a graduate student, and (3) you have not submitted your article to LSI or any other journals for publication. Submissions are limited to one paper per student.
Submissions must include a title page with a mailing address, email address, and phone number, and an abstract of no more than 200 words. The total length of submissions, including references and footnotes, must not exceed 15,000 words.
For additional information, please visit our website: www.americanbarfoundation.org
Questions regarding the competition can be directed to Bella Wilkes: bwilkes@abfn.org
Congratulations to the 2024 Graduate Student Paper Competition Winner: Walter G. Johnson
Walter G. Johnson’s paper “It's (Not) Just Semantics: ‘Neurotechnology’ as a Novel Space of Transnational Legal Governance” uses the concept of boundary work to show how individual and organizational actors, rather than creating new legal spaces, establish boundaries both around and within these legal spaces. Through an empirical case study of neurotechnology governance—drawing on data from interviews with governing elites, participant observation, and documents and archival resources—Johnson’s work supports the argument that what is being regulated can influence who creates the laws and how they’re made. Johnson (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University in the School of Regulation and Global Governance.
Past Winners
Caity Curry's paper “Public Defender Contestation and Compliance in Southern Courtrooms” examines the role of public defenders in criminal justice reform and transformation using a multimethod case study of Gideon’s Promise, an Atlanta-based public defense organization that trains defenders to resist mass incarceration. Caity Curry finds that many Gideon’s Promise attorneys in the U.S. South engage in resistance lawyering, using their skills to combat mass criminalization and entrenched class and racial inequalities. Curry (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Their research uses qualitative methods to investigate how the criminal legal system exacerbates and legitimizes racial and class inequalities.
Ryan Goehrung and Rachel Castellano won the 2022 prize for their paper on "Misrecognitions of Victimhood: Discretionary Power of Street-Level Bureaucrats in Humanitarian Visas". Ryan Goehrung and Rachel Castellano are PhD candidates in political science at the University of Washington. Ryan's primary research agenda centers on diversity, equity, and inclusion in political institutions and its implications for effective policy making, with a particular emphasis on gender and representation and a regional specialization in Southeast Asia. He worked in the international development field for over five years, including on anti-human trafficking initiatives with the Philippines government and US-based nonprofits. He is committed to producing research that is relevant for public policy and development practice, particularly on topics related to human trafficking, migration, and global inequality. Rachel's research explores human trafficking in the United States and how anti-trafficking nonprofits choose to serve specific groups of people. She also researches climate migration and the role that non-state actors play in addressing it.
Catherine Crooke won the 2021 Graduate Student Paper Competition for her paper "US Asylum Lawyering and Temporal Violence". Catherine Crooke (she/they) is a sociology PhD student at UCLA. Catherine's research interests include the sociology of refugee law and the construction of refugeehood as a legal status, a political concept, and a social category. Catherine's current research uses ethnography to study asylum lawyering in Los Angeles, examining how immigration attorneys adapt their work to navigate exclusionary policies of migration control. After completing her dissertation, Catherine hopes to pursue an academic career teaching law and sociology.
Cristinia Violante won the 2020 Graduate Student Paper Competition for “Liquidity: Water and Investment in Mandate Palestine,” which charts how water became an object of investment in Mandate Palestine, directing foreign capital into the area, shifting social and economic relations, and ultimately facilitating Zionist colonization. Cristina is a PhD Student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley. Her research explores the history of water law in the western United States, from its Spanish and pre-modern Islamic origins to the present.
LSI offers a huge congrats to Tobias Smith from Berkeley's Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program for winning LSI's 2019 prize for best graduate student paper. "Body Count Politics: Quantification, Secrecy and Capital Punishment in China" explores the tension between China's national imperative for the non-disclosure of death penalty data with its domestic valorization of quantification.
Congratulations to Stephen Wulff for winning our 2018 graduate student paper prize for his paper, “Flipping the ‘New Penology’ Script: Police Misconduct Insurance, Grassroots Activism, and Risk Management-Based Reform.” Wulff is a graduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota. In the first empirical study on the matter, Wulff analyzes the failed 2016 ballot campaign of the Committee for Professional Policing and its penological objectives and discourses.
Our 2017 winner is B. Robert Owens! Boyce Robert Owens is a sociologist of law and knowledge who earned his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago and currently works as a constultant at the Civic Consulting Alliance. In his winning paper, "What is a Social Group in the Eyes of the Law? Knowledge Work in Refugee Status Determination," Owens examines the settling and unsettling of legal concepts in relation to refugee status determination.
2016 GSPC winner is Evelyn Atkinson. Atkinson is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Her winning article is "The Burden of Taking Care: Children, Attractive Nuisance, and the Safety First Movement".
K-Sue Park won the 2015 GSPC with her paper, "Money, Mortgages, and The Conquest of America" in which she explores early transactions for land between settlers and indigenous people and the growth of the modern American contract economy.