About the award:
This year's winners are Matthew A. Axtell, for the paper "Customs of the River: Governing the Commons within a Nineteenth-Century Steamboat Economy," and Elizabeth Papp Kamali, for the paper "A Felonious State of Mind: Felony and Mens Rea in Medieval England."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
Matthew A. Axtell is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law and a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. He received his J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law in 2002. He is currently working on a dissertation titled "American Steamboat Gothic: Law, Commerce, and Collective Action in the U.S. Aquatic West, 1818-1868" (Hendrik Hartog, Chair).
Elizabeth Papp Kamali is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2007. She is working on a dissertation titled "A Felonious State of Mind: Mens Rea in 13th- and 14th-Century England" (Thomas A. Green and Charles Donahue, Jr., co-chairs).
Axtell and Kamali presented their papers on Friday at the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize Panel and received generous comments from Barbara Welke (University of Minnesota) and Karl Shoemaker (University of Wisconsin). Gautham Rao (American University) chaired the panel.
The 2013 competition for Preyer Scholars was organized by the Society's Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee:
Gautham Rao, Chair, American UniversityCongratulations to the winners!
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
