The deadline (May 31) for the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation's prize for an outstanding article published by an early career scholar is rapidly approaching. By way of background, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a prize of $2,500 for an excellent article in American legal history published by an early career scholar in 2012. Articles published in 2012 in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.
The Cromwell Foundation makes the final award, in consultation with a subcommittee from the American Society for Legal History. This subcommittee invites nominations for the article prize; authors are invited to nominate themselves or others may nominate works meeting the criteria that they have read and enjoyed. Please send a brief letter of nomination, no longer than a page, along with an electronic or hard copy of the article, by May 31, 2013, to the subcommittee's chair, Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, Campus Box #3380, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380 or via email at [email protected]. Other members of the Articles Subcomittee of the Cromwell Prizes Advisory Committee are Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College, Dean Daniel W. Hamilton of the UNLV, and Kristin A. Olbertson of Alma College.
Last year's prize, awarded at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in St. Louis, went to David Engstom's “The Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law: Regulatory Choice and the Making of Modern Civil Rights, 1943-1972,” which appeared in volume 63 of the Stanford Law Review in 2011. Cribbing now from the Cromwell Foundation's citation:
During deliberations Committee members praised Engstrom’s deep look at the strategies employed by various civil rights groups to craft fair employment law, along with his intensive archival work across a wide range of sources, to tell a new story about how civil rights emerged not just from statutes and from judicial interpretation, but from the administrative state as well. Recent monographs have begun to open up the story of civil rights in the post-War period by showing that civil rights action activism emerged in many places, not just on southern streets in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, and not just in education and in public accommodations. Engstrom, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, extends that analysis to the employment setting. In telling this new story, he extensively mined the federal archives. This is an important and neglected story that stretches across decades as our nation moved from the Second World War through the Civil Rights movement and then its ending. It is also an extraordinary work of research, which invites us to see how administrative law functions and is central to our legal history.
Further information on this and other awards and fellowships in legal history is available at the American Society for Legal History's webpage.
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