David Trubek, Voss-Bascom Professor of Law at the UW Law School and Director of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), has been awarded the Law and Society Association's Harry Kalven Prize for 2002. The prize recognizes a body of empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in the field of law and society. The Kalven Prize was awarded at the Law and Society conference in Vancouver in May. The prize committee's statement commending co-winners Trubek and Jane Collier, Stanford University Professor Emerita, states, "Our decision to award the Kalven Prize jointly to Jane Collier and David Trubek honors the major role each has played in modeling and situating critical discourses within socio-legal scholarship. . . . In Trubek's case, the institution building and scholarship are tightly interwoven. . . . In the past decade, he has mentored the move towards globalization and international perspectives both through the organization of conferences and through encouraging the work of younger scholars from the southern cone of Europe, from Southeast Asia and from Latin America." The statement continues, "David Trubek . . . has had a long and productive career as a law and society scholar. His early scholarship (in the 1960s and early 1970s) was on ?law and development,' focused on Brazil, and was strongly influenced by the work of Max Weber. Two long articles from this period (one co-authored with [UW Law Professor] Marc Galanter) offered a critical reading of Weber that differed from the dominant functionalist interpretations dominant at the time and provided a death knell to ?law and development' scholarship. The second stage of Trubek's work began with his arrival in 1973 at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he built the Institute for Legal Studies, while writing a variety of essays that explored the intersections between critical legal studies and the mainstream of law and society scholarship, most notably his 1984 essay in the Stanford Law Review, and a 1989 essay on ?critical empiricism' in Law and Social Inquiry. Trubek also led a number of research teams that did intensive data gathering and interpretation on civil disputing. The third period of his work began in the 1990s, when he became Dean of International Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Since that time, his scholarly work has focused on the globalization of law, with particular emphases on labor relations and issues related to transformations in legal practice. He has also explored the revival of ?law and development' work in the post-Cold War era. "Both Collier and Trubek have demonstrated extraordinary commitment to building an intellectual community of law and society scholars that goes beyond disciplinary and national borders. Trubek, in particular, has been a tireless creator of interdisciplinary events, occasions when new forms of scholarship ? critical race theory, feminist legal thought, the ?new' international law, the history of legal thought, to take only a few examples ? came into being through the bringing together of engaged but disparate voices. Indeed, if the shift towards anthropology/ethnography, the entry of several critical discourses (feminism, critical legal studies), and the move towards globalization and international perspectives can be said to mark the present conjuncture in socio-legal research, then together and individually Collier and Trubek have helped to make that conjuncture happen and each of them exemplifies and models it as an aspiration for the rest of us." UW Law Professors Stewart Macaulay and Marc Galanter have also been recipients of the Harry Kalven Prize, which is named for the head of the University of Chicago's jury project in the 1950s. Kalven was a nationally recognized teachers of torts, and a firm supporter of civil liberties during the McCarthy era. At this May's Vancouver conference, two other UW Law School professors were recognized for work in the field of Law and Society. Howard Erlanger was honored for his 20 years as book review editor for the society's journal, Law and Social Inquiry, and Assistant Professor Catherine Albiston won the Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation of the year on a law and society subject [see separate news items on Albiston and Erlanger].

Submitted by on June 24, 2002

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