The
Law and Society Association has
announced the winners of its 2016 prizes. We are delighted to report that former guest blogger
Felice Batlan (Illinois Institute of Technology-Chicago-Kent College of Law) was awarded the
J. Willard Hurst Award (for "the best book in Socio-Legal History published in 2015") for
Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Here's the citation:
In Women and Justice for the Poor, Felice Batlan
reconstructs a lost history of legal aid in the United States. Building
on extensive and creative archival research, she pushes beyond
traditional narratives of the early history of legal aid and accepted
definitions of the meaning of legal work. She shows how in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women’s organizations became
leading providers of legal aid in major cities across the United
States.
Batlan then examines the dramatic consequences when, in the
early twentieth century, professional male lawyers took an interest in
legal aid. Male lawyers sought to professionalize legal aid. Part of
this professionalization process involved the displacement of the women
lay lawyers who for generations had been providing legal services to
underprivileged communities. At stake in this conflict was not only the
question of who could claim professional authority but also two
different models of legal aid. One model—which became associated with
the rising profession of social workers—sought to blur the line between
legal and non-legal services, insisting on a holistic approach to
clients’ problems, aiming at substantive rather than procedural
justice, and focusing on the entire family unit, rather than focusing
simply on the individual. The ultimately triumphant model pushed by
certain male lawyers insisted instead on the distinctive nature of
legal problems and knowledge and focused on delivering solutions to
individual clients. Strikingly, as Batlan shows, the end result of this
conflict was not a linear progression from social work to law—or from
women to men—but a complex story in which conflict was followed by
mutual accommodation for several decades in the 1930s and 1940s, before
the more expansive, social-work-oriented view largely (though never
entirely) succumbed.
Previous scholars have missed this rich and fascinating
history because, as Batlan explains, the men who sought to control legal
aid in the early twentieth century also rewrote its history,
intentionally excluding the key role of women. Batlan’s book thus
provides a vital corrective story. Through this rich social history of
legal aid from the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century, Batlan
challenges her readers to think more critically about what it means to
practice law and how historians write about the history of lawyering. Women and Justice for the Poor is a remarkable feat of historical excavation and reinterpretation.
Honorable mentions went to another former guest blogger,
Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings), for
Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and to
Katherine Unterman (Texas A&M University) for
Uncle Sam's Policeman: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (Harvard University Press, 2015).
