The Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia calls for nominations for the third biennial Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in law, literature and the humanities. Penny Pether (1957-2013) was an Australian scholar whose passionate life-long commitment to the field pervaded every aspect of her research, teaching and academic life. She helped convene the first conference of the Law and Literature Association and founded the interdisciplinary journal Law Text Culture. She was a mentor to younger academics and graduate students in the field. She held, demanded, and advocated the highest standards of interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor. The Penny Pether Prize reflects and honours her commitments.

The winner of the 2015 Penny Pether Prize was Professor Alison Young for Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination (Routledge, 2014), reviewed here by Shaun McVeigh.

Prize rules

1. The purpose of the Prize is to acknowledge and advance work in the field of law, literature and humanities in relation to Australasia.

The Award

2. The Committee will award the prize to the author or authors whose book has, in the judgment of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of Australasian law, literature and humanities since the award of the last prize

3. The winner will be invited to a panel discussion of their work at an appropriate LLHAA conference. Their work will be reviewed and publicised on the Law Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia website/blog.

4. The winner will receive a prize certificate from the Law Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia

5. An additional Penny Pether Prize may be awarded to Early Career Researchers  (defined as a person who has been awarded a PhD within the last 5 years) if the Committee deems that this is warranted.

Eligibility

6. Eligible authors will include those who write in the field of Australasian law, literature, and humanities or those whose scholarship in law, literature and humanities emerges from Australasia and the region.

7. The prize will be awarded for a work written by a scholar residing in Australasia and the region or whose work has a distinctively Australasian focus, with a particular emphasis on scholars who have been actively involved in the activities and scholarly endeavours of the Association, or who is nominated by a member of the Association.

8. To be eligible, the relevant work must bear a publication date of 2015, 2016 or 2017 and not previously been nominated for the Prize.

9. The author must be prepared to attend and participate in the LLHAA Conference held at the University of Melbourne, December, 2017.

Administration and Adjudication

10. The prize will be awarded to the author or authors whose book, in the judgment of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of law, literature and humanities in Australasia.

11. Nominations can be made by anyone.

12. The award will be judged by a committee established by the current membership of the management committee of LLHAA (“the Committee”).

13. The Committee’s decision will be made by a majority vote and will not be open to review.

14. Where a member of the Committee has been nominated for the award, that member will abstain from voting on the award and will not be present when the Committee is considering the nominations.

15. The submission of nominations for the first prize must be made by 31st August 2017. The award will be announced in November 2017. Nominations are to be sent by email to Honni.vanRijswijk@uts.edu.au.