The 2008 Podgorecki price was awarded at the opening ceremony of the Milan – Como RCSL Meeting. This year it was awarded to a young scholar. Rosemary Hunter, the chair of the committee who made the selection, had the pleasure to inform the participants that the price was awarded to a young French scholar : Liora Israël.
Liora Israël represents very well the new generation of French young scholars in social sciences who work on legal or judicial objects. She is a sociologist. She has completed her PhD in sociology in 2003, with her doctoral dissertation « Dark Robes, Dark Years. Resistance Among Lawyers and Magistrates » : she analyzes how a few of them used the law and handled their professional activity in order to resist to the Vichy regime. She received the higher honours for her Phd. Her dissertation was published in 2005 as a book under the title : « Robes noires et années sombres. Avocats et magistrats en résistance pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ». Here is the summary of her dissertation:
« Resistance in legal circles is an occasion to study the legal professions, political mobilization and law in action through the example of a critical historical situation.
The parallel examination of lawyers and magistrates, and even law professors, during World War Two is a mean to focus on the use of law, despite the statutory differences between those professions that interested most of the scholars in the past. Legal professions are thus redefined on the basis of their common use of law. The political reach of law is examined through its mobilization in judiciary resistance. More generally, resistance is analyzed as a form of collective action. The focus on mobilization of resources and coordination between actors leads to stress on the peculiar impact of clandestinity and risk, especially in the judiciary. Concerning the use of law, this research takes into account the various dimensions of legal mobilization in political action, including legitimacy, use of the judicial arena, and expertise.» – She has contributed to popularize the cause lawyering movment in France and has written a chapter in Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold(eds) The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make : Structure and Agency in Legal Practice(Proofs attached). – She is very active in the field of sociology of law, working to develop it through networking, teaching and through her currents researches on the political mobilisation of law in the Seventies. – She is a founding member and former co-president of the « legal sociology » network of the French sociological association and has still co-organized many scientific meetings. – She is junior professor at the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales where she teaches sociology of law.”
This page last updated 25 July 2008