Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award: Call for Submissions

Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to announce the competition for its annual Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  This paper competition is open to all having with five (5) or fewer years of full-time law teaching experience as of July 1, 2025. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2025.

The purpose of the award is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship related to gender and the law.  The work chosen for the Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award should make a substantial contribution to legal literature and reflect original research and/or major developments in previously reported research.

Papers will be reviewed on a blind basis by a committee comprised of members of the Haub Law full-time faculty with expertise in this area.  The winner of the competition will be invited to present the paper to selected students and faculty at Haub Law (located in White Plains, NY) during the 2025-2026 academic year, with reasonable travel expenses from within the continental U.S. paid, or via Zoom, as circumstances permit and by mutual agreement.

ELIGIBILITY:

• All persons who have held full-time teaching positions for five (5) or fewer full academic years as of July 1, 2025 are eligible for consideration. One does not have to be on the tenure-track or tenured to be eligible. Time as a VAP or Fellow does not “count against” the five (5) year clock.
• There is no subject-matter limitation for submissions, as long as the paper relates in some way to gender and the law.
• Jointly authored papers are accepted as long as each author independently meets the eligibility requirements.

PUBLICATION COMMITMENTS/LIMITATIONS:

• There is no publication commitment associated with the competition. 
• Papers are eligible regardless of whether they were published prior to submission date, are scheduled to be published after the submission date, or are not yet under submission.
• Each applicant is limited to one (1) entry.
• Papers considered in prior years’ competitions are eligible for resubmission.
• There are no page-length or word-count limitations.
• All publications (including scholarly articles, book chapters, legal briefs and other writings) are eligible for consideration.

SUBMISSION:

• We will accept submissions for the Emerging Scholar Award from June 1, 2025, through July 1, 2025. The winner will be announced by August 30, 2025.
• To participate, please email your work, redacted as necessary to preserve anonymity (for the blind judging process), as a portable data file (PDF) to Judy Jaeger, Senior Staff Associate, at [email protected] with the subject line “Emerging Scholar Award.”
• Please include in the body of the email your name, institutional affiliation and confirmation that you meet the eligibility requirements.
• Unredacted or late papers will not be considered.

More details after the fold.

 

Information on Emerging Scholar Award and the Elisabeth Haub School of Law

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to host an annual paper competition for its Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  The law school at Pace University is one of a small number of schools in the United States named after a woman, and we are proud of our school’s long-standing commitment to gender justice.

Since the establishment of the Women’s Justice Center in 1991, Haub Law has made gender justice a priority.  Students have the ability to pursue a path to practice in Women, Gender & the Law, through which they develop skills and strategies for effective representation and advocacy for women and gender justice, regardless of what career they pursue.  The Haub Law faculty includes nationally recognized academic experts and advocates for women and gender justice. Our faculty teach, research and write about gender equality and justice as it relates to constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, education, environmental law, estate planning, juvenile justice, legal theory, poverty, public health, social media, and taxation, to name just a few areas.  An important hallmark of Haub Law is that in addition to our specialty classes that focus on gender, issues involving gender are also integrated into a wide range of other courses.

Prior Winners

2020 – Greer Donley, Contraceptive Equity: Curing the Sex Discrimination in the ACA’s Mandate, 71 Ala. L. Rev. 499 (2019)

2021 – Marie Amélie George, Exploring Identity, 54 Fam. L.Q. 1 (2021)

2022 – Elizabeth D. Katz, Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women's Legal Right to Hold Public Office, 33 Yale J. Law & Feminism 110 (2022)

2023 – Emily J. Stolzenberg, Nonconsensual Family Obligations, 48 BYU L. Rev. 625 (2022)

2024 – Laura Portuondo, Gendered Liberty, 113 Geo. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2025).

Comments

[Judith Butler in a Burqa]

Only females and people who identify as women have ever won this women, gender & the law award?

We can do better, Bridget.

[anon]

At the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked her to define the word “woman.”

“I can’t — ” Jackson replied.

“You can’t?” Blackburn said.

“Not in this context. I’m not a biologist,” Jackson said.

“The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn asked.

The folks running this sort of embarrassing exercise (that seems to encourage sexism) make " gender justice a priority. Students ... develop skills and strategies for effective representation and advocacy for women." As pointed out above, it appears every winner of this "award" has been a woman. Gender "justice" indeed.

Tripping over the intersection of bigotry, prejudice, political correctness and ignorance, the sexist nature of this exercise seem to know quite well who is a "woman." (Do males exist for any purpose other than breeding, objectification and opprobrium)?

Hopefully, this sort of alienating attack on gender justice will be coming to an end soon.