Graduate Student Annual Conference Paper Prize
Applications are now open.
The Stanford Center for Law and History will invite paper submissions from graduate students for its seventh annual conference, “Native Legal Histories: Methods, Sovereignties, and Identities.” The Native nations forcibly included within the United States have had complex and nuanced legal histories. This conference will explore histories of both Indigenous law and Native encounters with U.S. law to better understand Indigenous communities’ legal experiences and understandings.It will bring together scholars of law and history to examine Indigenous legal histories across a range of venues and themes. Focusing, in particular, on questions of methods, sovereignties, and identities, the conference seeks to consider how the growing and robust field of Native legal history might help us to reconsider familiar narratives of law and its past.
This one-day conference will be held on Friday, April 11th, 2025, at Stanford Law School. It will include four panels and a graduate student lighting round with breakfast and lunch provided.
Areas of possible, but not exhaustive, legal-historical interest include:
Methodologies in Indigenous Legal History
Native Peoples and the Courts
Sovereignty and Tribal Law
Treaties and Constitutions
Indigenous Identity and the Law
SCLH’s goal is to bring together faculty, postdocs, and students for workshops, conferences, and lectures examining the relationships between law and history, broadly defined. With these goals in mind we encourage submissions from scholars working across disciplines.
The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will present on one of the three conference panels. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.
Application Requirements:
- CV
- Paper abstract (500 words or less)
Applications closed on January 31st, 2025. Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.
Past and Present Winners

Will Holub-Moorman
2024 Conference, “Legal Histories of American Governance: Institutions and the State”
Will Holub-Moorman, Princeton University, “Tough Love: Child Support Enforcement, Welfare Reform, and the US Administrative State, 1970-2000"

Evelyn Kessler
2023 Conference, “Legal Histories of the Body and the State”
Evelyn Kessler, University of Chicago History Department, “Age of Consent: The Making of the Sexual Body and the Body Politic in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.”

Beck Boorstein
2022 Conference, “Legal Histories of Disease”
Beck Boorstein, Yale University History Department, “Calling the Shots: Civil Liberties and Anti-Vaccination Lawsuits in the Progressive Era United States, 1900-1920”

Haris A. Durrani
2021 Conference, "Working with Intellectual Property: Legal Histories of Innovation, Labor, and Creativity
Haris A. Durrani, Columbia Law School and Princeton University (History of Science), “The Recent History of Free Space: Law, Technology, and the US Administrative State in the Global Cold War.”

Hardeep Dhillon
2019 Conference, “Legal Histories and Legacies of the Nineteenth Amendment”
Hardeep Dhillon, Harvard History Department, “Bordering Whiteness: Alien Tales and the Making of U.S. Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century.”

Naama Maor
2018 Conference, “Legal Histories of Policing and Surveillance”
Naama Maor, University of Chicago History Department, “Reforming Delinquent Parents: Adults on Trial in the Progressive Era Juvenile Justice System.”