In 2022, the Foundation established the $10,000 prize for the best legal history article of the year. The prize is intended to recognize the growing role of legal history teaching and research in law schools. Articles on legal history published in a journal of legal scholarship, including student-edited law reviews, or written by a scholar with a degree in law, are eligible for consideration. Articles published in a journal issue that first became available to subscribers or to the public in the year 2024 are eligible for next year’s prize.
To select each year’s winning article, the Foundation appointed a committee of legal scholars chaired by Cromwell trustee and Yale law professor John Fabian Witt. The other current members of the committee are Cromwell trustees Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and John H. Langbein of Yale Law School, as well as Daniel R. Ernst, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History at Georgetown Law School; Amalia Kessler, the Lewis Talbot and Nadine Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies at Stanford Law School; Alison L. LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School; and Troy McKenzie, Dean and Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at NYU School of Law.
Authors and journal editors are welcome to nominate articles, although articles fitting the criteria of the prize may be considered whether or not they are nominated. Please submit nominations by February 1, 2025 through the submission function below.
Application Procedure
Past Recipients
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2024 | Tanner Allread of Stanford University, “The Specter of Indian Removal: The Persistence of State Supremacy Arguments in Federal Indian Law,” 123 Colum. L. Rev. 1533 (2023). |
| 2024 | Taisu Zhang & John D. Morley of Yale Law School, “The Modern State and the Rise of the Business Corporation,” 132 Yale L.J. 1970 (2023). |
| 2023 | Gregory Ablavsky of Stanford Law School, “Getting Public Rights Wrong: The Lost History of the Private Land Claims,” 74 Stan. L. Rev. 277 (2022). |