JSP & Legal Studies Year in Review

June 30, 2026

Awards, Fellowships, and Honors

Here are some of the awards, fellowships, and honors received by JSP and Legal Studies students, faculty, and alumni over the last year:

  • Quincy Becker received a Doctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Law Center for Private Law Theory.

  • Legal Studies graduate, Levi Garrett Cannon, received the 2026 LSA Undergraduate Student Paper Prize for his paper, “Defining Custody Resolution: How Parent Coordinators Construct Family Law,” which was based on his Legal Studies Honors thesis. Professor Catherine “KT” Albiston served as Levi’s thesis advisor. 

  • Dhammika Dharmapala was named the Robert and Joann Burch Distinguished Professor of Tax Law and Policy at Berkeley Law and Professor (by courtesy) at the Goldman School of Public Policy.

  • Brianne Felsher received the Stuart F. Smith Teaching Fellowship at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

  • Anthony Ghaly received the John L. Simpson Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship in International & Area Studies from Global, International, and Area Studies (GIAS) and was also accepted to participate in the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) at Syracuse University in summer 2026 through the open pool process, which accepted only 12 students, with funding provided for fees, lodging, and food.

  • Saloni Jaiswal received a Doctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Law Center for Private Law Theory.

  • Margot Lipin received the John Higham Research Fellowship from the Organization of American Historians.

  • Margot Lipin’s paper, “Fashioning Streetwalkers: Dress, Race, and Sexual Policing in Early Twentieth-Century New York,” received the Austin Sarat Award for best graduate student paper from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, & the Humanities (ASLCH).

  • JSP alumna Laura Beth Nielsen received the LSA Ronald Pipkin Service Award for sustained and extraordinary service to LSA. She is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.

  • Yael Plitmann was selected to participate in the NEH Summer Institute on “Law and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Toolkit for the Humanities Scholar” at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

  • Kate Reeves received a Berkeley Human Rights Center Fellowship.

  • Kate Reeves received the UC Berkeley’s Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize in Literary Composition for her poem titled “How I Know When the Humidity Will Break.”

  • Nina Russell received a Doctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Law Center for Private Law Theory and research funding from the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative (BESI).

Publications

Here is a sample of scholarship by JSP students and faculty that was published this past year: