Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Akhil Reed Amar ’84 received the 2026 Scribes Book Award for his book, “Born Equal.”
The second volume of a planned trilogy, “Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920” (Basic Books) traces the passage of four transformative constitutional amendments adopted in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War: the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; the 14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship; and the 15th Amendment declaring equal political rights for Black Americans. “Born Equal” also received the 2026 Lincoln Institute Book Prize in March 2026.
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Read a Q&A with Akhil Reed Amar about the book
A constitutional law professor and scholar, Amar is the author of more than a hundred law review articles and several books, including “The Bill of Rights” (1998), “America’s Constitution” (2005), “America’s Unwritten Constitution” (2012), and “The Constitution Today” (2016). The first volume of his ambitious trilogy on American constitutional history from the founding to the present, “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840,” was published in May 2021.
Arthur Liman Professor of Law Judith Resnik was a runner up for the 2026 Scribes Book Award for “Impermissible Punishments.”
“Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy” (University of Chicago Press) charts the invention of the corrections profession, tracing constitutional challenges thereafter to hypercrowded cells, filth, violence, and profound isolation, as well as the cross-border expansion of the prison industry, waves of abolition efforts, and the impact of legal precepts rejecting “excessive,” “cruel and unusual,” and “degrading” sanctions. Resnik argues that governments committed to equality cannot set out to ruin people.
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Resnik, who also serves as founding director of the Liman Center for Public Interest Law, is a professor whose scholarship spans the relationship of democratic values to government services such as courts, prisons, and post offices; the role of collective redress and class actions; contemporary conflicts over privatization; the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender. Resnik previously received the Scribes award in 2012 for her co-authored book with Clinical Professor Emeritus of Law Dennis Curtis ’66, “Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms.”
Richard Primus ’98, the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, was also a runner up for his book “The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power.”
Previous Law School faculty awardees include “The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World” by Professors Oona A. Hathaway ’97 and Scott J. Shapiro ’90 in 2018 and “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History” by Professor John Fabian Witt ’99 in 2013.
Since 1961, Scribes—The American Society of Legal Writers has presented an annual award for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year. The Scribes Book-Award Committee generally receives between 40 and 50 nominees each year, and the award is typically presented at the Scribes’ Annual Meeting.
