The RCSL has awarded the Podgórecki Prize 2022 for outstanding scholarship of an early career socio-legal scholar to Professor Melissa Crouch. Melissa Crouch is Professor of the School of Global and Public Law, University of New South Wales, Australia. Melissa is the author of The Constitution of Myanmar (2019) and Law and Religion in Indonesia: Conflict and the Courts in West Java (2014). She has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals including Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and International Journal of Constitutional Law. She is the editor of several volumes, including Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (2023) and Women and the Judiciary in the Asia-Pacific (CUP 2021). This year’s Podgorecki Prize Committee was composed by Germano Schwartz (chair), Benoit Bastard and Dee Smythe.
(Source: RCSL Newsletter 2022(2), p. 7)
Acceptance of Podgórecki Prize 2022 By Melissa Crouch
It is a great honor to be awarded the Podgórecki Prize 2022 for sociolegal research. I would like to thank my three nominators who have been mentors to me and who model diverse ways of being and doing sociolegal research. I have greatly valued the opportunity to learn from Professor Adam Czarnota and Professor Martin Krygier (UNSW) on transitional justice and the rule of law respectively, particularly through our collaborations in Myanmar over many years. They generously shared their research expertise, experiences and knowledge of the democratic and constitutional transition in Eastern and Central Europe to an eager audience. I also express my deep appreciation to my third nominator, Professor Adriaan Bedner (University of Leiden) for the opportunity to learn from his tireless leadership, partnerships and contributions to the growing sociolegal community of scholars in Indonesia, the world’s third largest democracy.
Id also like to extend my thanks to the president and council members of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, and to this year’s Prize Committee: Professor Germano Schwartz (chair), Professor Benoit Bastard (University of Paris) and Professor Dee Smythe (University of Cape Town). I appreciate that the time and effort involved in sitting on prize committees is a real service to the field.
The RCSL plays an important role in connecting and fostering a generous intellectual community of sociolegal scholars. In my view, one of the great strengths of the RCSL is the depth and breadth of its comparative focus on the legal profession. I have appreciated been involved in the international working group on lawyers in the 21st century and contributing in a small way to the publication of the second edition of Richard Abel’s classic collaborative text.
My research has focused on authoritarian regimes and the challenges for law, the legal profession and the courts in such contexts. While the study of law in illiberal and authoritarian regimes was once peripheral, the rise of populism, the decline of democracy and the global pandemic has seen the topic pushed to the front and centre of much research. The study of law in authoritarian and illiberal regimes poses particular methodological and ethical challenges; one way to navigate these issues is by adopting a socio-legal approach.
Overall, the RCSL embodies for me a long-standing commitment by scholars of sociolegal studies to the empirical study of legal pluralism. For my work on both Indonesia and Myanmar, legal pluralism is an indispensable concept and one that remains salient in the 21st century due to the interaction of international, regional and domestic legal orders as well as non-state forms of law.
Thank you again for this prize, it is humbling, unexpected and a great honor.
Melissa Crouch
melissa.crouch<at>unsw.edu.au
Delivered at the Lund 2023 RCSL Meeting, first published in RCSL Newsletter 2023 (3) p. 11
See the 2022 Podgórecki Prize Call for Nominations
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This page last updated 20 May 2024