Background

In 2015, the Commission on Legal Pluralism decided to introduce a ‘Young Scholar Award’ for the best paper presented during the biennial conferences, with a view to drawing more attention to this field of study and academic research.

Eligible candidates

The award is conceived as an incentive award for young researchers, and the nominations are limited to ‘young scholars’, i.e. scholars who obtained their PhD (or any other degree where relevant) no longer than six years before the starting date of the conference.

The prize is awarded at each biannual conference and consists of a present and the publication of the winning paper in the peer-reviewed, international Journal of Legal Pluralism. For more information on the journal please visit the CLP website.

Criteria for participation 

To qualify for the best paper award, submissions have to fulfil the following requirements:

• Papers should be original work, not published earlier; papers by more than one author are  accepted, on the condition that all authors fulfil the requirements;
• Papers should be accepted and presented at the conference for which it is submitted;
• Papers should be full papers, well-written (in English), clearly structured, argued and referenced;
• Papers should clearly address issues that are relevant to the field of legal pluralism, either as a fully theoretical paper or as a case study-based paper linking insights from the case study to theory of legal pluralism.

Jury

All manuscripts will be evaluated and the prize winners selected by an international jury that is composed of one member of the Executive Body of the Commission on Legal Pluralism, one member of the local organizing committee of the conference and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of legal Pluralism.

Submission procedure for the Ottawa conference

The deadline for submission of papers for the Ottawa conference is 1 June 2018. Papers submitted for the award should be submitted personally by the author(s) of the paper. If you intend to participate, send your paper to Dik Roth (dik.roth@wur.nl), adding a cover letter stating that you wish to participate and that author(s) and paper fulfil the general requirements.

Presentation

The Young Scholar Award 2018 will be presented at the General Assembly of the biennial conference of the Commission on Legal Pluralism held in Ottawa from 22 to 24 August 2018. More details will be announced later.

Additional information

For more information please contact Dik.Roth@wur.nl