Jeannie Suk, an assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, has been awarded the Herbert Jacob Prize for her book, “At Home in the Law,” by the Law and Society Association. The prize, awarded for the most outstanding book in law and society of the year, was presented to Suk at the Association’s annual meeting in Chicago on May 29.
“At Home in the Law”—Suk’s second book— examines how legal feminism is changing views of behavior in the home and definitions of domestic abuse. She covers the growing legal developments on related subjects including privacy, self-defense, sexual autonomy, and property. Through case studies, Suk outlines how the boundaries between public and private space are shifting—with a corresponding and unexpected reduction in autonomy for women in relation to the state.
A press release from the Law and Society Association called “At Home in the Law” a “groundbreaking achievement … engaging and thought provoking, this book is exemplary of exceptionally well-grounded socio-legal analysis.”
Suk was appointed an assistant professor at Harvard Law School in 2006. She has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow and Senior Fellow at the Humanities Center at Harvard. In addition to her J.D. from HLS, she holds a D. Phil. from Oxford University and a B.A. from Yale. Her research interests include criminal law and procedure, family law, art law, and entertainment law.
The Herbert Jacob Prize was created in memory of Herbert Jacob, a past president of the Law and Society Association, and a founder of the first internet book review in the field. The 2010 Prize committee includes Rosen Shamir, chair (Tel Aviv University), Taunya Banks (University of Maryland), Susan Coutin (University of California, Irvine), Christine Harrington (New York University), and Charles Venator Santiago (University of Connecticut).
Suk is also the author of “Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing.”
— Marcel Moran