Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Distinguished Scholar of the Institute for Legal Studies at UW Law School, has received the Law and Society Association Harry J. Kalven, Jr. prize, recognizing a career of outstanding contributions to the field of socio-legal studies.

The prize citation states:

"During his long, distinguished and extraordinarily prolific scholarly career, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has exemplified and thus predicted the key traits of the modern law and society movement: interdisciplinarity, multi-culturalism, and an international (now global) understanding of law.

In his many writings on subjects ranging from the sociology of law to human rights, from law and democracy to legal pluralism, and more recently to law and globalization - Boa Santos has not only consistently opened up new subjects and perspectives, and developed new concepts for empirical and theoretical analysis in ways that have inspired generations of scholars to follow his interests and example, he has also, just as consistently, championed those excluded from civil society as it is conceived in the Western tradition, seeking new definitions of the key concepts of our time - transnationalism, globalization - that will mobilize rather than disempower the world's majorities."

Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a full professor at the University of Coimbra, School of Economics, Department of Sociology, in Portugal. He has published extensively on issues related to law and globalization, legal pluralism, multiculturalism, and human rights and has taught at law schools and graduate schools in Brazil, England, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Angola, Mozambique, and Spain, in addition to his current Coimbra and Madison posts.

To read more about Kalven Prize recipients, go here.

Submitted by UW Law News on July 8, 2011

This article appears in the categories: Articles