Several prize deadlines are announced in the Winter/Spring issue of the American Society for Legal History Newsletter.
Conference papers submitted for the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars award are due June 15, 2008. The program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society.
The deadline for the John Phillip Reid Book Award for the best book published in 2007 in English in any of the fields broadly defined as Anglo-American legal history is May 30, 2008. Nominations for this year’s prize should include a curriculum vitae of the author and be accompanied by a hard copy version of the work (no electronic submissions, please).
Cromwell book prize and dissertation prizes
Cromwell book prize
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually a $5000 prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American Legal History by a junior scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, and faculty not yet tenured. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. The Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. In 2006, the Committee considered books and articles published, or dissertations accepted, in the previous calendar year.
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
The Cromwell Foundation has also established a $2500 prize for dissertations accepted or student articles written in the previous year in the general field of American legal history (broadly conceived), with some preference for those in the area of early America or the colonial period.
Anyone may nominate works for the Cromwell Prizes. The Committee will accept nominations from authors, dissertation advisors, presses, or anyone else. Nominations for this year’s prizes should include a curriculum vitae of the author and be accompanied by a hard copy version of the work (no electronic submissions, please) sent to each member of the Committee and postmarked no later than May 31, 2008.
More information about all of these prizes, including addresses for members of prize committees is here.
Don't be shy about asking your press (or your professor) to nominate you, or send your book or dissertation in yourself. Presses are often unaware of book prizes like this, and sometimes deadlines are missed. The bottom line is: you have to be the advocate for your own work.
