ABF Scholars Win LSA Awards for their Outstanding Contributions to Law and Society Research

“The LSA Prizes represent the very best of interdisciplinary empirical scholarship designed to interrogate the relationship between law and society,” ABF Research Professor and LSA President Laura Beth Nielsen said. “It is particularly meaningful that so many ABF scholars have been recognized this year.” 

Elizabeth Mertz, ABF Research Professor and John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Wisconsin Law School, has received two recognitions from the LSA this year. She has won the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize in recognition of her legal scholarship on law and language. She has also received the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award for her steadfast guidance to junior scholars and her commitment to legal education. 

Reuben Jonathan Miller, ABF Research Professor and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, has won the Herbert Jacob Book Prize for Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (Little, Brown and Company, 2022). Drawing on 15 years of person experience, he provides an account of the suppressive afterlife of imprisonment.  

Spencer Headworth, ABF Affiliated Scholar and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, received an Honorable Mention for the Herbert Jacob Book Prize for his work studying crime, social control, and inequality. His book Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance (University of Chicago Press, 2021) was recognized for its analysis of welfare fraud control units, a novel intersection between the worlds of public benefits and law enforcement.  

Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine and former ABF/AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education, received an Honorable Mention for the Herbert Jacob Book Prize for Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton University Press, 2021), which was completed during their time at ABF. 

“The American Bar Foundation has a long tradition of contributing outstanding and innovative research to socio-legal scholarship and providing superb service to the Law and Society Association,” ABF Director Ajay K. Mehrotra said. “We are proud that this tradition has been acknowledged once again this year with a slew of LSA awards to our ABF scholars.” 

Read the official LSA announcement of the 2022 award winners here.  

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About the American Bar Foundation

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is among the world’s leading research institutes for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation. 

About the Law and Society Association 

The Law and Society Association is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts. 

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