Laura A. Cisneros (LL.M. ‘08) has been selected as one of two young scholars in the United States to receive the Scholarly Papers Award for 2009 from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

Cisneros completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2008 as a William H. Hastie Fellow, and now is an Assistant Professor of Law at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston.

Two winners were chosen for this year’s competition, selected by a "blind-grading" process from among 58 papers submitted. Cisneros’s co-winner is Deborah Widiss, Visiting Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Harvard Law School Professor Todd Rakoff, who chaired the Special Committee to Review Scholarly Papers, commented, "There was such a high level of enthusiasm for both of the winning papers that the committee found it impossible to choose only one of them."

Cisneros’s paper is titled "Standing Doctrine, Judicial Technique, and the Gradual Shift from Rights-Based Constitutionalism to Executive Constitutionalism." Widiss’s paper is "Shadow Precedents and the Separation of Powers: Statutory Interpretation of Congressional Overrides." The two authors will present their papers Thursday, January 8, 2009, at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego.

The long-standing competition was designed to highlight the work of junior faculty. Entrants are limited to full-time law teachers who have been teaching for five or fewer years.

For more information on the UW Law School's Hastie Fellowship Program, see http://law.wisc.edu/grad/fellow_hastie.html .

Submitted by on November 25, 2008

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