1998 Sutherland Prize
Winner
David J. Ibbetson, "Fault and Absolute
Liability in Pre-Modern Contract Law," 18 Journal of Legal History
1-31 (1997).
Honourable Mention:
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Statutes of Rape and
Alleged Ravishers of Wives: A Context for the Charges Against Thomas
Mallory, Knight," 28 Viator 361-419 (1997).
The committee wrote, "We urge all Society
members to treat themselves to this model for interdisciplinary primary
research and expository writing. Prof. Kelly tells a fascinating story
of sex and the late-medieval status of parliamentary statute, centered
on the writer of the English epic, Morte d'Arthur.
1998 History Surrency Prize
Winner
The Committee deemed the following pieces
from Volume 15 of the Law and History Review to be eligible
for the Surrency Prize this year:
1. G. Edward White, "The American Law
Institute and the Triumph of
Modernist Jurisprudence,"
2. Henrik Langeluddecke, "Law and Order
in Seventeenth-Century England:
The Organization of Local Administration During Personal Rule of
Charles I,"
3. Girish Bhat, "The Moralization of
Guilt in Late Imperial Russian Trial
by Jury: The Early Reform Era,"
4. Anthony Musson, "Twelve Good Men and
True? The Character of Early
Fourteenth-Century Juries,"
5. Houston and Van der Heijden, "Hands
Across the Water: The Making and
Breaking of Marriage Between Dutch and Scots in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century,"
6. Kuehn, "A Late Medieval Conflict of
Laws: Inheritance by Illegitimates
in Ius Commune and Ius Proprium,"
7. Hackney, "Law and Neoclassical
Economics: Science, Politics and the
Reconfiguration of American Tort Law Theory."
All three of the Committee members
concluded that White's article on the American Law Institute, in its
conceptualization, research, and writing, demonstrated a very high
degree of scholarly imagination and accomplishment. We agreed that
it was lucidly argued and nicely showed the professional, legal,
intellectual factors that contributed to a shift to pragmatic,
modernist legal thought. Furthermore, it persuasively demonstrated the
significance of the American Law Institute as a site for the
reorientation of American jurisprudence.
Although we had a difficult time settling
on a finalist, it was White's compelling argumentation and thesis that
made the piece stand out from the rest. For this reason, the Committee
selected White's paper for the 1998 Surrency Prize.