At the recent meeting of the Law and Society Association, the Association announced the winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (recognizing "exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law"). Legal historical scholarship made a strong showing. The winners, along with the citations, were as follows:
Jasmine E. Harris – University of Pennsylvania
The Political Economy of Conservatorship. UCLA Law Review, 71(5), 1364-1482
Jasmine E. Harris’s “The Political Economy of Conservatorship,” published in the UCLA Law Review, reinterprets conservatorship as a tool of racial and economic subordination. Harris weaves legal history, disability theory, and racial critique into an incisive analysis of how disability law has been used to extract labor and property from Black and Indigenous communities. By connecting conservatorship’s historical deployment to its contemporary operation, Harris exposes the system’s deep-seated structural harm. Her article exemplifies socio-legal scholarship at its finest and proposes an abolitionist framework with broad implications for race, disability, and legal reform.
Daniel S. Harawa – New York University
Coloring in the Fourth Amendment. Harvard Law Review, 137(6), 1533-1582
Daniel Harawa’s “Coloring in the Fourth Amendment,” published in the Harvard Law Review, delivers a powerful and incisive challenge to the colorblind assumptions embedded in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. By exposing how race-neutral legal standards mask racial subordination in policing, Harawa articulates a doctrinal and normative argument for a race-conscious reasonable person standard. Grounded in constitutional theory and racial justice advocacy, this article exemplifies rigorous scholarship and has the potential to reshape legal understandings of policing, seizures, and race
An honorable mention went to legal historian Giuliana Perrone (University of California, Santa Barbara) for Rehearsals for Reparations, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 10(2), 132-150. The citation:
Giuliana Perrone’s “Rehearsals for Reparations,” published in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, uncovers a neglected archive of postbellum litigation in which freed people sued to enforce testamentary bequests from former enslavers. Recasting these legal actions as early reparations claims, Perrone reveals the moral and legal logic through which formerly enslaved individuals asserted their rights to property, land, and justice. The article is an outstanding contribution to the history of race and the law and offers a new frame for understanding reparations in American legal history.
Congratulations to all!
-- Karen Tani
