Austin Sarat Award

Annual prize offered to a graduate or professional student for an outstanding paper presented at the LCH annual conference.

Submit for this Award

Nominations for the award must be received in June, following the conference.

Submit Your Materials

The Austin Sarat Award is a prize offered to a graduate or professional student for an outstanding paper presented at the LCH annual conference. We are looking for papers that represent excellence in interdisciplinary thought, research and writing in the field of law, culture, and the humanities. Although presentation of the paper at the annual conference is required to be eligible, the award winner will be chosen based upon finished papers submitted after the annual conference.

Nominations are due following the conference. If you are not sure that the paper was presented by a graduate student, email and we can check. Once we have received nominations, authors will be contacted for their papers. Please feel free to nominate your own paper!

Submission Instructions

If you are not sure that the paper was presented by a graduate student, email and we can check. Once we have received nominations, authors will be contacted for their papers. Please feel free to nominate your own paper!

Submit Your Materials

Featured Winner(s)

  • 2023

    Joshua D.M. Shaw (co-winner)

    “Humic Lawscapes”

    Ph.D. Candidate, Law, York University

    Lindsay O’Connor Stern (co-winner)

    “Administering Presence”

    Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature, Yale University

Show Full List

  • 2019

    Elizabeth Rule

    “Reproducing Resistance: Gendered Violence and Indigenous Nationhood”

  • 2018

    Tad Lemieux

    “Care/Takers of the Earth: The Rhetoric of Futurity in the Baffin Bay Seismic Survey”

    Ph.D. Candidate, English, Carleton University

  • 2017

    Sara Ross

    “Buen Vivir and Subaltern Cosmopolitan Legality in Urban Cultural Governance and Redevelopment Frameworks: The Equitable Right to Diverse Iterations of Culture in the City and a New Urban Legal Anthropological Approach”

    Ph.D. Candidate, Law, York University

  • 2015

    K-Sue Park

    “Foreclosure and Dispossession” 

    J.D. (Harvard)
    Ph.D., Rhetoric, UC Berkeley 

    Staff attorney & Equal Justice Works Fellow, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (El Paso, TX)

  • 2014

    KB Burnside-Oxendine 

    “Life and Death, and Normal”

    Ph.D. candidate, Literature, Duke University 

  • 2013

    Alexandra Havrylyshyn 

    “Foreclosure and Dispossession” 

    Ph.D. candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley