Thursday, May 5, 2011

Book Prizes in American Legal History

[I'm moving this post up as the deadlines for submissions for the Reid Book Award (May 27) and Cromwell Book Prize (May 31) will soon be upon us. The previous recipients are here. Eligible authors, please don't be bashful about nudging your presses!]

Here is a joint announcement of the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History and the Cromwell Book Prize of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. The Reid Award and the Cromwell Book Prize are mutually exclusive. The Reid Award is for a book by a mid-career or senior scholar, and the Cromwell Book Prize is for a “first book” by a junior scholar. For advice where the distinction is doubtful, please consult Gerald Leonard, chair of the ASLH Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award, and Daniel Ernst, Chair of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee.

John Phillip Reid Book Award

Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the American Society for Legal History, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The award is given on the recommendation of the American Society for Legal History's John Philip Reid Prize Committee.

For the 2010 prize, the Reid Award Committee will accept nominations from authors, presses, or anyone else, of any book that bears a copyright date in 2010. Nominations for the Reid Award should be submitted by May 27, 2011, by sending a curriculum vitae of the author and one copy of the book to each member of the committee:

Professor Gerald Leonard
Chair, ASLH Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
gleonard@bu.edu

Professor Susanna Blumenthal
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Professor Philip Girard
Schulich School of Law
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
CANADA B3H 4H9

Catharine MacMillan
Department of Law
Queen Mary College, University of London
Mile End Road
LondonE1 4NS
UNITED KINGDOM

Professor Reva Siegel
Yale Law School
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520

Cromwell Book Prize

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation was established in 1930 to promote and encourage scholarship in legal history, particularly in the colonial and early national periods of the United States. The Foundation has supported the publication of legal records as well as historical monographs. Among the prizes it annually awards is a $5000 book 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, post-doctoral fellows 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 prize is limited to “first books,” i.e., works by a junior scholar that constitute his or her first major undertaking.

The Cromwell Foundation awards the prize on the recommendation of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee of the American Society for Legal History. The Committee will consider books published in 2010. The Society will announce the award after the annual meeting of the Cromwell Foundation, which normally takes place early in November.

To nominate a book, please send copies of it and the curriculum vitae of its author to John D. Gordan, III, Chair of the Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee, and to each member of the Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Committee with a postmark no later than May 31, 2011.

John D. Gordan, III
Chair, Cromwell Prize Advisory Committee
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
1133 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10128

Professor Daniel R. Ernst
Chair, Cromwell Book Prize Advisory Subcommittee
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001-2075
ernst@law.georgetown.edu

Professor Christian McMillen
Department of History
Randall Hall
PO Box 400180
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904

Professor Tony Freyer
University of Alabama School of Law
101 Paul Bryant Drive, East
Box 870382
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0382

Professor Laura Kalman
Department of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410