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

April 18, 2016, Press releases

Three American Bar Foundation (ABF) Scholars have been selected as recipients of the 2016 Awards of the Law and Society Association (LSA). Shari Diamond, Sida Liu, and Ellen Berrey were recognized for their exceptional contributions to the LSA and the research and literature on law and society. The winners were announced on the LSA website on April 14. The awards will be presented at a ceremony during the LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans this June.

Shari Diamond

Shari Diamond, ABF research professor and professor of law and psychology at Northwestern University School of Law, has won the Ronald Pipkin Service Award for sustained and extraordinary service to the LSA. Among many other contributions, Diamond has chaired the Law & Society Review Editor Search Committee and the Publications Committee, served as an LSA Trustee, and been an active member of the Executive Officer Search Committee and the LSA/ABF Fellowship Committee. In their announcement, LSA noted that Diamond has motivated several others in her field to become active members in the LSA.

Sida Liu

Sida Liu, ABF faculty fellow and professor of sociology and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received an Honorable Mention for the LSA Article Award for exceptional scholarship in socio-legal studies. Liu’s article, “Law’s Social Forms: A Powerless Approach to the Sociology of Law,” was published in the ABF’s Law & Social Inquiry in 2015. In the article, Liu examines the power/inequality approach that has dominated the sociology of law in the United States since the 1960s.

Ellen Berrey

Ellen Berrey, professor of sociology at the University of Denver and a former ABF doctoral fellow, has won the Herbert Jacob Book Award for the best book in law and society scholarship published in 2015. Berrey’s book, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice, was based off of the dissertation she worked on during her doctoral fellowship at the ABF. During that time, Berrey collaborated with ABF Research Professors Laura Beth Nielsen and Robert L. Nelson.

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

Read the official LSA announcement of the 2016 award winners here.


Please find a PDF of this press release here.

Posted by: Cheyenne Blount

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