[Linganth] Language and Law article competition -- deadline January 31st

[Ilana Gershon]

Call for Nominations: The Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award 2025
A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary scholarship in law, literature,
and language, Penelope J. Pether (1957-2013) was Professor of Law at
Villanova University School of Law and former Professor of Law and Director
of Legal Rhetoric at the American University Washington College of Law. Her
own scholarship focused not only on law, literature, and language, but also
on constitutional and comparative constitutional law; legal theory,
including constitutional theory; common law legal institutions, judging
practices, and professional subject formation.
Beginning in November 2013, the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language
Scholarship has been given to an article or essay published during the
preceding award period that exemplifies Penny’s commitment to law and
language scholarship and pedagogy. This year’s award period will be the
calendar year 2025.
We are delighted to report that the Legal Humanities Initiative at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, will now be providing much needed
administrative support for the award. The selection committee is grateful
for LHI’s commitment to Penny’s legacy.
The Committee selecting award recipients from among the articles and essays
nominated will look for scholarship that not only embodies Penny’s passion
and spirit but also has some or all of the following characteristics:
1. “[S]cholarship concerning itself with the unique or distinctive insights
that might emerge from interdisciplinary inquiries into ‘law’ grounded in
the work of influential theorists of language and discourse.”
2. Scholarship that “attempts to think through the relations among subject
formation, language, and law.”
3. Scholarship that provides “accounts of—and linguistic interventions
in—acute and yet abiding crises in law, its institutions and discourses.”
4. Scholarship and pedagogy, including work addressing injustices in
legal-academic institutions and practices, that is “[c]arefully theorized
and situated, insisting on engaging politics and law, [and that] charts
ways for law and its subjects to use power, do justice.”
More explanations and descriptions of these characteristics can be found in
Penny’s chapter from which these quotations are drawn: Language, in Law and
the Humanities: An Introduction (Austin Sarat et al. eds., Cambridge U.
Press 2010).
A list of past winners appears here:
https://law.unlv.edu/lawyering-process/penny-pether
*Nominations should be sent by January 31, 2026, to Jeannine DeLombard at
jdelombard at ucsb.edu <jdelombard at ucsb.edu>.*
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