Thursday, November 2, 2017

Preyer Awards to Funk and Ossei-Owusu

The American Society for Legal History created the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Award to recognize promising new entrants to the field. This year’s Preyer Prize winners are Kellen Funk and Shaun Ossei-Owusu.

Funk is a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, where he studies American legal, political, and religious history. He also holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. His paper is entitled, “The Swearer’s Prayer: Race, Piety, and the Rise of Oaths in Modern American Practice.”

Ossei-Owusu is the Kellis E. Parker Teaching Fellow at Columbia Law School, where he draws on law, history, and sociology to study government services to the poor. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His paper is entitled, “Racial Discounting and Self-Help: Blacks, Americanization, and the Early Twentieth-Century Legal Aid Movement.”

Both scholars presented their work at the Preyer Memorial Prize Panel at the annual meeting. Jed Shugerman (Fordham University School of Law) commented on Funk’s paper. Susan Carle (American University Washington College of Law) commented on Ossei-Owusu’s paper.

The members of the the 2017 Preyer Memorial Committee were H. Timothy Lovelace (Indiana University), Chair; Melissa Hayes (independent scholar); Michael Hoeflich (University of Kansas); Rabia Belt (Stanford University); and Jed Shugerman (Fordham University School of Law).