Congratulations to
Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School, for winning
the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize of the Law and Society Association “for this year’s best sociolegal history book. Ablavsky’s book,
Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021), explains the growth of federal authority in the first two U.S. federal territories—the Northwest and Southwest. While the Washington administration, Congress, federal officials, land office administrators and other federal bureaucrats sought to assert their vision of federal power over the West, the land they sought to govern and transform was far from empty. His book addresses the underlying questions of what federal power is and who its architects are. The book further identifies how the federal government can be studied—not as a monolith, but as the outcome of many different struggles playing out at grass-roots levels.”
We hear that Nada Moumtaz, University of Toronto, received Honorable Mention for God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021).
--Dan Ernst
