AALS Section on Race and Private Law Establishes Annual Award in Honor of Professor Patricia J. Williams

12.12.2024 — To recognize the trailblazing career of University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities Patricia Williams, the Race and Private Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools has named an annual award in her honor. The Patricia J. Williams Award celebrates Williams’ role as a leading critical race theorist, feminist legal theorist and private law trailblazer. Professor Mehrsa Baradaran of UC Irvine School of Law is the inaugural recipient, selected for her outstanding contributions to the field of race and private law. The award ceremony will be held in January 2025.

“With a focus on contracting and private ordering, the Race and Private Law Section focuses on the essential nature of private law in shaping other legal doctrines, alongside its pivotal role in the distribution of social and material advantages that often determine racial and economic disparities. Because of its focus, the section’s founding members unanimously agreed that our section award must bear Professor Williams’ name as a tribute to her groundbreaking legacy as a scholar of race and contract, and that there would be no better inaugural awardee than Professor Baradaran,” said Section Chair Carliss Chatman.

“I feel so honored, so humbled and so very lucky. But most of all, I feel delight that the inaugural recipient will be Mehrsa Baradaran for her extraordinary scholarship,” said Williams, the author of multiple books and hundreds of essays and articles in leading journals, popular magazines and newspapers. Her most recent book is The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024). Her 1991 book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, was named one of the 25 best books of 1991 by the Voice Literary Supplement; one of the “feminist classics of the last 20 years” that “literally changed women’s lives” by Ms. magazine; and one of the 10 best non-fiction books of the decade by Amazon.com. She has also received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship.