Increasing diversity in the legal profession demands workplaces expand opportunities for and contribute to the success of underrepresented students including racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, and students who identify as LGBTQ+, by creating an educational pipeline that supports students into and through law school and into the legal profession. The Alexander Award was created to honor an individual or organization that has demonstrated exemplary leadership and success in building such an educational pipeline.

Each year, the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice recognizes the best work of administrative law scholarship for the prior year.

The Society sponsors fellowships to foster innovative scholarship, promote inclusive membership, and to cultivate new generations of legal historians. These fellowships support programs that create smaller and more focused venues where early career scholars may develop their skills, seek opportunities for career-building publications, interact with senior scholars, and meet peers from around the world with whom they will collaborate throughout their careers.

The American Society for Legal History awards scholars each year in a number of categories ranging from dissertation to books to articles and digital projects. Each prize is detailed on the page linked above.

The John Phillip Reid Book Award is awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history.

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history.

NAWL gives numerous awards to law students, legal professionals, and attorneys who have attained a high level of professional accomplishment and have demonstrated a personal commitment to and positive impact on NAWL’s mission of advancing women in the profession or advocating for women under the law.

The WSC recognizes contributions to the field through several awards including:
• Paul Tappan Award – For outstanding contributions to the field of criminology
• June Morrison-Tom Gitchoff Founders Award – For significant improvement of the quality of justice
• W.E.B. DuBois Award – For significant contributions to the field of racial and ethnic issues in criminology
• Meda Chesney-Lind Award– For significant contributions to scholarship or activism on the intersection of women and crime
• Richard Tewksbury Award– For significant contributions to scholarship or activism on the intersection of crime and sexuality
• Henry F. Fradella Award– For significant contributions to empirical scholarship on the legal aspects of criminal justice
Anyone may submit a nomination. Neither the nominator nor the nominee needs to be a member of the WSC.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation offers an annual prize of $5,000 for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar. Articles published in the preceding calendar year 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.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation awards annually to an early career scholar a $5000 book prize for excellence in scholarship in the field of American legal history. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference.

The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has established an early career scholar dissertation prize of $5,000. The winning dissertation may focus on any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference. Anyone on whom a Ph.D. or S.J.D. degree has been conferred in the preceding calendar year will be eligible for this year’s prize. A dissertation may be considered for the prize only once.

Each year, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation makes available a number of early career scholar fellowships intended to support research and writing in American legal history. The number of fellowships to be awarded, and their amounts, are at the discretion of the Foundation. In the past several years, the trustees of the Foundation have awarded from three to eight fellowships, in amounts of $5,000.