2009

Yves Dezalay earned his doctorate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, working with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Since 1984 he has been at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is currently the center’s director of research. Yves has been a long-time Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and has been a visiting professor at various institutions in the United States and Europe. He describes the Law and Society Association as his main intellectual home for more than 20 years.
    His principal contribution to the law and society movement has been to creatively and painstakingly show how deeply globalization has affected the legal profession. He is an expert on the international market for legal expertise and the role of lawyers in shaping state power under conditions of globalization. His empirical base is impressive: it includes over 3000 interviews in 30 nations.
    Yves Dezalay earned his doctorate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, working with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Since 1984 he has been at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is currently the center’s director of research. Yves has been a long-time Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and has been a visiting professor at various institutions in the United States and Europe. He describes the Law and Society Association as his main intellectual home for more than 20 years.
    Yves Dezalay’s principal contribution to the law and society movement has been to creatively and painstakingly show how deeply globalization has affected the legal profession. He is an expert on the international market for legal expertise and the role of lawyers in shaping state power under conditions of globalization. His empirical base is impressive: it includes over 3000 interviews in 30 nations. His contributions emphasize how “globalization provides a forum for competition between professional groups, and how law becomes both the product of, and conduit for, battles to consolidate state power.” Globalization, in short, has internationalized the legal system in unprecedented ways, creating a new internationalized legal order. His is the most exhaustive body of socio-legal research in this area to date, and probably the most insightful. Representative works include his Merchants of Law: The Expansion of the ‘American Model’ and the Construction of a Transnational Juridical Order.  
    Much of Dezalay’s work has been written with Professor Bryant Garth. They have been frequent collaborators since 1986. Together they wrote: Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Emergence of a New International Legal Order and The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Their new book will appear this year: Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers, Politics and the Re-structuring of States from Colonialism to Hegemony. This will be a major synthetic work covering a wide range of areas in which lawyers work, including neoliberal models of governance, foreign relations, and human rights.
   With this award, we honor a scholar who has opened up a whole new field of law and society research with work that is extensive and will be of lasting influence. We honor a man who has been a public intellectual, a mentor of new scholars from around the world, as well as a very productive research scholar.

2007

  (co-winner)

Dario Melossi

  (co-winner)

Xingliang Chen was among the first generation of Chinese university students after the Cultural Revolution. He studied law at Peking University Law School from 1977 to 1981 and received a LL.B degree there. After graduation, he entered the law school of Renmin University of China for further study, receiving a LL.M in 1984 and another LL.D in 1987. From 1985 to 1998, Prof. Chen taught at the Law School of Renmin University of China. Since 1998, he has been a professor of criminal law, criminology and criminal justice at Peking University Law School and the first Yangtze River Distinguished Scholar in the field of arts and social sciences appointed by the Ministry of Education. In 1997, Prof. Chen created Criminal Law Review and Criminal Case Review and has been the editor-in-chief of both since then. These Reviews have been widely regarded as the most influential and authoritative academic publications in the fields of criminal law and criminology in China.

       Xingliang Chen has made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the crime, law, and society field, and has been central to the advancement of the rule of law in China. Among his colleagues in China, Japan, and South Korea, he is widely regarded as the most important scholar of crime and criminal justice policy in the PRC. His studies cover key areas in penology, criminal law, and criminal procedure, usually with an emphasis on the interactions between and among law, politics, society, and culture. In his highly acclaimed Philosophy of Criminal Law, Chen analyzed the social and legal changes during the 1980s and the 1990s in China and underscored the emergence of a civil society relatively autonomous of political society. A Memorandum on Capital Punishment reviewed the Chinese history of capital punishment and criticized its excessive use in contemporary China. Professor Chen recently called for giving review and approval power of death sentences to the Supreme People’s Court, a reform that was instituted on January 1, 2007.

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Dario Melossi received his law degree from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1972 and his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986. He began his career in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Davis, returning to Italy and joining the faculty at the University of Bologna in 1993. From 1997 to 2004, he was a Visiting Professor of Criminology at Keele University. From 1994 to 1996, he was a Visiting Professor in the Masters’ Program of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain. Beginning in 1998 and continuing to the present, he has been on the Board of the International Doctorate in Criminology at Trento University, Italy. Currently, he is Professor of Criminology on the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna.

       Dario Melossi has made many important contributions to the area of social control, security, and neo-liberalism, and his scholarship has influenced law and society scholarship internationally for more than two decades. He has authored or co-authored seven monographs and edited or co-edited four other volumes. The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System (translated from the Italian Carcere e Fabbrica), co-authored with Massimo Pavarini, is a classic in punishment theory. His 2005 piece in the European Law Journal, entitled “Security, Social Control, Democracy and Migration,” is exemplary of his analytic precision and theoretical scope, tackling issues that cross disciplinary and thematic boundaries. In the process of addressing the debate on European constitutionalism, Melossi examines the perceived nexus between migration, criminalization, and security that is so important to contemporary political discourse, not only in Europe but worldwide. Prof. Melossi has published in English, Italian, German, Spanish, and Greek outlets. His work on punishment theory, migration, security, and social control more generally work that is always incisive and often seemingly prescient embodies international scholarship at its best.

2005

Hazel Genn was the first person appointed to a chair in Socio-Legal Studies in the UK, a founding member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association and  was its first President. More than any other scholar, Hazel Genn has put socio‑legal studies on the academic 'map' in the UK, and made socio-legal research central to policymakers concerned with law, lawyers and the legal system. Throughout her career, she has engaged in groundbreaking empirical work, shaping the landscape of UK socio‑legal studies and its role in legal change. Her long‑standing research interests are in access to justice, alternative dispute resolution, and civil justice. Hazel's contribution to academia and to socio‑legal studies in particular has been widely recognized in the UK; she was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2002 became Vice‑President of its council; in 2000 she was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her work on civil justice. A member of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (RCSL), she has maintained longstanding links with international scholars working on the legal profession around the world. Most recently, her Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999) has proved extraordinarily influential world-wide. The study is being replicated in Japan, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada and Australia. Her work on mediation has also been widely influential, most notably in Central and Eastern Europe. Hazel has had a major influence on policy-makers around the world. Her stature as an authority in her field has led to numerous invitations to join delegations and to address legislative bodies in Beijing, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, and Bulgaria, to name just a few. She is part of the Council of Europe's Working Group on the Efficiency of Justice, and a member of the Council's Consortium Comparing European Judicial Systems. She has published widely in the field including Meeting Legal Needs? (1981); Hard Bargaining: Out of Court Settlement in Personal Injury Actions (1987); The Effectiveness of Representation at Tribunals (1989); Tribunals and Informal Justice (1992); Personal Injury Compensation: How Much is Enough? (1994); Survey of Litigation Costs for the Woolf Inquiry into Access to Justice (1996); Understanding Civil Justice (1997); Mediation in Action (1999); and Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999) (with Sarah Beinhart).  Along with teaching at University College London where she is Professor of Socio‑Legal Studies in the Faculty of Laws, she remains a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Tilburg and Leiden in The Netherlands, and at the University of Hong Kong, and is a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

2003

2001