Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young legal historians, 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. (Whether there is a Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Panel at the meeting, as there was this year, or whether the Preyer Scholars present their papers as part of other panel depends on the subject-matter of the winning papers and on what is on the rest of the program.) The generosity of Professor Preyer's friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting. The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society's Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.*
In 2012, the Preyer Memorial Committee**
chose two Preyer Scholars:
- Sarah Levine-Gronningsater (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago), for her paper “Poor Law, Slave Law, God’s Law: Quaker Antislavery and the Early Modern Origins of New York’s Gradual Emancipation”
- Taisu Zhang (Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University; Visiting Assistant Professor, Duke University School of Law), for his paper “Kinship Networks, Social Status and the Creation of Property Rights in Early Modern China and England”
* Language is from the ASLH website.
** Gautham Rao (Chair), Sally Hadden (Western Michigan University), Christopher W. Schmidt (Chicago-Kent College of Law), Michael A. Schoeppner (California Institute of Technology), Karen Tani (University of California, Berkeley).
