Boalt faculty came home from the The Association of American Law Schools annual conference this month with a basketful of honors and awards.
Professor Rachel Moran was elected president of the association, which represents 170 law schools. She will be president-elect for 2008, taking over as president for 2009.
Assistant Professor Anne Joseph O’Connell won the overall award for best scholarly paper by a junior scholar. O’Connell’s paper is called “Political Cycles of Rulemaking: An Empirical Portrait of the Modern Administrative State.” It examines rulemaking at federal agencies over the past 20 years and the interplay with politics.
Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice section of the AALS gave Erin Murphy the best paper award for a junior scholar for “Paradigms of Restraint.” That paper examines the emerging technologies that governments are using to control dangerous people, including DNA databasing, electronic monitoring, electronic indexing, and biometric scanning.
Professor Angela Harris won the Clyde Ferguson Award. It is named in honor of the first African American tenured professor on the Harvard Law School faculty. The Minority Section of the AALS grants the award to “an outstanding law teacher who, in the course of his or her career, has achieved excellence in the areas of public service, teaching, and scholarship. The award is particularly aimed at law teachers who have provided support, encouragement and mentoring to colleagues, students and aspiring legal educators.”