Posted April 17, 2008
Goluboff Wins Hurst Prize for "Lost Promise"
Professor Risa Goluboff’s book on the early civil rights movement, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” won the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize, given by the Law and Society Association for the best work in socio-legal history published in 2007. Goluboff will share the prize with Mary Dewhurst Lewis for her work, “The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940.”
“This prize is especially meaningful because it’s awarded to legal historians by legal historians and law and society scholars,” Goluboff said. “The prior winners are an impressive group of people and I’m pleased to be associated with them.”
Former winners include Law School Professor G. Edward White in 1990 and former UVA Dean of Arts and Sciences Edward Ayers in 1986.
Published by Harvard University Press, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights” explores the fight for black economic and labor rights from the 1930s until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing “separate but equal” schools set the stage for looking at race primarily through the lens of integration in education.
“‘The Lost Promise of Civil Rights’ makes a singular contribution to the law and society literature,” said Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a legal history and civil rights scholar. “It recasts labor rights as civil rights, and gives voice to subjects who rarely receive attention in legal scholarship — African-American workers. The award is richly deserved.”
The award will be presented to Goluboff during the Law and Society Association annual meeting on May 31.
• REPORTED BY mary wood