New Cromwell Article Prize Announced

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]


The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation recently established a $10,000 prize [emphasis supplied] for the best legal history article of the year.  The prize is intended to recognize the growing role of legal history teaching and research in law schools.  Articles on legal history published in a journal of legal scholarship, including student-edited law reviews, or written by a scholar with a degree in law, are eligible for consideration.  Articles published in a journal issue that first became available to subscribers or to the public in the year 2022 are eligible for the 2022 prize.

To select the winning article, the Foundation has appointed a committee of legal scholars chaired by Cromwell trustee and Yale law professor John Fabian Witt.  The other members of the committee are Cromwell trustees Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and John H. Langbein of Yale Law School, as well as Daniel R. Ernst, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History at Georgetown Law School; Amalia Kessler, the Lewis Talbot and Nadine Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies at Stanford Law School; Alison L. LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School; and Troy McKenzie, Dean and Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at NYU School of Law.

Authors and journal editors are welcome to nominate articles, though articles fitting the criteria of the prize may be considered whether or not they are nominated.  Please submit nominations by February 1, 2023 through the submission function [here].

The Foundation, funded principally by a bequest from eminent lawyer William Nelson Cromwell, who died in 1948, has for a number of years awarded Early Scholar prizes for books, articles and dissertations, as well as funding numerous other legal history projects.  This is the first prize the Foundation has offered which is open to scholars of any level of seniority.