Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the John Phillip Reid Book Award.
About the award: This prize is "awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The prize is named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues. When awarding this prize, preference is given to work that falls within Reid’s own interests in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglo-America and Native American law."
This year's award went to Kunal M. Parker (University of Miami School of Law) for The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024. The citation:
Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant
intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political
science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing
ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques,
and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with
the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major
epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple
claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and
decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil
rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative
book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger
context and illuminates essential questions about the history of
knowledge and intellectual authority.
Congratulations to Professor Parker!
-- Karen Tani
