The American Society for Legal History announced today that it has awarded its 2014 John Philip Reid Award to Michele Landis Dauber, Stanford Law School professor of law and Bernard D. Bergreen Faculty Scholar, for her first book, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State.

In an email announcing the award, Sophia Z. Lee, chair of the awards committee and a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, hailed the book as “magnificent.” Lee wrote to Dauber that the award committee members were “incredibly impressed not only by your multiple important historiographical interventions, but also your creative use of sources.”

The book was also honored this year with the American Historical Association’s 2014 Littleton-Griswold Prize, the American Sociological Association’s 2014 Sociology of Law Section Distinguished Book Award and the American Political Science Association’s 2014 J. David Greenstone Book Award for the best book in politics and history. In 2013 the Law and Society Association gave the book an honorable mention in its James Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History competition.

“I am surprised and very pleased the book received so much recognition,” said Dauber. “To be honest, I get excited when anybody reads anything I write and finds it useful or informative.”

In The Sympathetic State, Dauber argues that the United States’ long tradition of providing federal disaster relief set the stage for the American social welfare state. “It’s really an important story in our country’s history about how the government has cared for people when they were in need through no fault of their own,” Dauber explained.

“The book has relevance not only regarding the current debates about the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid but also with respect to the debate about emergency response,” she said. “As climate change makes weather events more severe and frequent, the federal government’s policy about how we take care of people will become more important. For example, if people live in an area that often gets flooded, will we always compensate them? What happens when people have to move?”

The book was published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press.