The purpose of this award is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship and to broaden participation by new law teachers. It is open to those who will have been full-time law teachers at an AALS member or fee-paid school for five years or less.

Fulltime faculty members without tenure at the time of the work’s publication, including those with fellowships, visiting assistant professorships, or similar positions, are eligible. The work may be on any topic related to administrative law, although the award selection committee may favor works with greater general applicability. Any substantial scholarly work, whether a law review article, monograph, or chapter, published in the previous year is eligible.

This inaugural award honors the contributions, service, and leadership of a scholar in legal education and the legal profession with a non-tenured law school faculty member or law school faculty member with less than 10 years’ experience. The recipient is someone who has great potential to make a mark during their career as evidenced by work that brings a novel perspective or call for action in legal education or the legal profession for aging populations.

The “Mark Tushnet Prize” recognizes scholarly excellence in any subject of comparative law by an untenured scholar at an AALS Member School. The Prize will be given to the author(s) of a scholarly article judged to have made an important contribution in the field of comparative law.

The Paper Competition is the Section’s way of encouraging and recognizing scholarship by junior members of the legal academy (teaching six years or fewer).

The purpose of the award program is to recognize outstanding scholarship in the field of federal courts by untenured faculty members. To that end, eligible articles are those specifically in the field of Federal Courts that were published by a recognized journal during the twelve-month period ending on September 1, 2023 (date of actual publication determines eligibility). Eligible authors are those who, at the close of nominations (i.e., as of September 15, 2023), are untenured, full-time faculty members at AALS member or affiliate schools, and have not previously won the award.

The Four Directions Section Awards honor individuals who have made contributions to the field of Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples: Four awards are available: Early Career (7 years or less) Scholarship Award, Clinic Impact Award, Early Career (7 years or less) Teaching and/or Public Service Award, and Mentoring in the Legal Academy Award.

• The Hart-Dworkin Award in Legal Philosophy is given annually to a scholar who has made significant and lasting contributions to the philosophical understanding of law
• The Jurisprudence Section Article Award is given annually to a tenured or tenure-track scholar in recognition of an exceptional philosophical work of legal scholarship
• The Future Promise Award is given annually to a pre-tenure-track or early tenure-track scholar whose work reflects future promise in both philosophy and law

Awarded to a scholar who is within their first ten years of teaching at an AALS member school for an article on the subject of law and religion published within twelve months of the submission deadline, which is August 15 of each year. The article must be nominated by a faculty member at an AALS member school.

The Clyde Ferguson Award honors an outstanding law teacher, who, in the course of his or her career, has achieved excellence in the areas of public service, teaching, and scholarship, particularly law teachers who have provided support, encouragement and mentoring to colleagues, students and aspiring legal educators. The Derrick Bell Award honors a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching or scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice.

The American Constitution Society’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award recognizes an outstanding scholar in the early stages of their academic career who has demonstrated those qualities exemplified by Justice Ginsburg: scholarly excellence, the ability to imagine how society might be more just and more equal, and the determination to use the law and one’s scholarship to creatively and strategically make the imagined real.

Every other year, The American Law Institute awards the Early Career Scholars Medal to one or two outstanding early-career law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law. The purpose of the award is to encourage practical scholarly work and to publicize the work of the honorees by sponsoring conferences on issues related to their work.

Early-career scholars who wish to present a paper on any topic in legal, institutional and/or constitutional history, at the annual ASLH conference.

The purpose of the award from Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship related to gender and the law. The work should make a substantial contribution to legal literature and reflect original research and/or major developments in previously reported research. This paper competition is open to all full-time law professors with five (5) or fewer years of full-time law teaching experience.

The Legal Writing Institute honors members of the legal writing community with awards in a variety of fields, such as Legal Communication, curriculum design, and the well-known Golden Pen Award. Two new awards for Emerging Scholars and Influential Teaching were established in 2019.

The Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award honors a young researcher, within ten years of their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of political methodology.

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.

The Emerging Scholar of the Year Award celebrates the achievements of early-career academics who have made significant contributions to legal thought and scholarship. It seeks to promote scholarship that has the potential to drive improvements in the law and to spotlight the exceptional work of its honorees. The Emerging Scholar of the Year will be selected by the Journal’s editors after a thorough review process. The Journal will not be accepting outside nominations or recommendations for this award.