Princeton University Student Laura Nelson Wins Law & Social Inquiry’s 2026 Graduate Student Paper Competition

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is delighted to announce that Laura Nelson, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University, has won the 2026 Graduate Student Paper Competition from Law & Social Inquiry (LSI) for her article titled “Registries, Records, and the Making of Emancipation in Pennsylvania.” The paper examines how Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act transformed slavery and freedom into matters of documentation, revealing emancipation as a prolonged struggle over legal legibility and the production of records. 

The ABF is the institutional home of LSI, a quarterly publication that analyzes law, legal institutions, and the legal profession from a sociolegal perspective. Every year, LSI conducts a competition for the best journal-length paper in the field of law and social science written by a graduate or law student. Submissions are evaluated by LSI’s editors, and the winning submission will be sent to scholars for advisory reviews prior to publication.  

Drawing on county registries, Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) records, and historical correspondence, Nelson’s research argues that Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition regime transformed emancipation into a documentary process rather than a simple legislative act. By requiring enslavers to register those they held in bondage while leaving freedom itself unrecorded, the law made liberty legible only through the absence of documentation, creating both opportunities and vulnerabilities for Black Pennsylvanians. The paper highlights how enslaved and free Black people, together with their allies, navigated this system by producing and preserving records that could support claims to freedom, while the PAS emerged as a critical institutional archive supplementing the state’s incomplete record-keeping. Ultimately, the research reveals emancipation as an ongoing struggle over legibility, in which documentation functioned simultaneously as a tool of recognition and a source of suspicion. 

“The editorial committee was excited to read such an original and well-researched article,” said LSI editor Traci Burch, ABF Research Professor and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. “Nelson skillfully engages historical evidence and historiographical debates to show the process through which a system of documentary proof of emancipation developed. This article already is an impressive contribution to the literature, and we are proud to publish it in LSI.” 

“I’m honored by this recognition from Law & Social Inquiry,” said Nelson. “I hope this paper contributes to broader conversations about how marginalized people have understood and navigated law not only in courts and legislatures but in the everyday practices through which they made claims and imagined more secure forms of freedom.”