The Law and Society Association will honor an Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor this week at its 2024 Annual Meeting in Denver from June 6-9.
Professor India Thusi will receive the John Hope Franklin Prize, recognizing exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.
Thusi’s winning work, “The Racialized History of Vice Policing,” was published in the UCLA Law Review in 2023.
“The article provides an enduring scholarly contribution at the intersection of policing, abolition, and legal history,” according to the LSA. “Thusi adopts an abolitionist framework and provides a much-needed analysis of vice policing as a mechanism to sustain racism and racialized marginalization. This well-written and compelling article is the beginning of a rich and important project that will continue to open up new avenues in research on race, racism, and law for years to come.”
The Franklin Prize is awarded for an article published in the two calendar years prior to the award year. The competition is open to all forms of law and society scholarship, to authors at any stage of their careers, and to authors from any country of origin. Articles may be published in any scholarly journal, including socio-legal journals, journals in other disciplines, and law reviews, or may be a chapter in a book volume.
Thusi is the Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at the Law School, and a senior scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. Her research examines racial and sexual hierarchies as they relate to policing, race, and gender. Thusi’s research is inextricably connected to her previous legal experience at organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and—most recently—The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab that collaborates to effect lasting policy and culture change.
She was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Global Scholar for 2020-2023.
“I am so pleased to see Professor Thusi’s scholarship recognized by the Law and Society Association,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “The John Hope Franklin Prize is a prestigious honor won in the past by scholars at Northwestern, Harvard, and UC-Berkeley, and I am proud Professor Thusi will join them.”
The Law and Society Association is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts.