2025
Myriam E. Gilles wins CJRI's "Best Publication Prize"
The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best Publication Prize is Myriam E. Gilles for her article "Arbitration's Unraveling." The prize is awarded annually by the CJRI Board of Advisors to recognize the best scholarly work in the previous year on a civil justice issue that is relevant to practitioners.
2024
William S. Dodge, Maggie Gardner, and Christopher A. Whytock win CJRI’s "Best Article Prize"
The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winners of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, are William Dodge (UC Davis), Maggie Gardner (Cornell Law) and Chistopher Whytock (UC Irvine) for “The Many State Doctrines of Forum Non Conveniens,” published in the February 2023 issue of the Duke Law Journal. The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. This year’s prize-winning article pulls back the curtain on the historical myths surrounding the legal doctrine “forum non conveniens,” which allows judges to decline to hear a case submitted to their court on the grounds that the case would be more appropriately heard in another court. Dodge, Gardner, and Whytock demonstrate that the doctrine has only shallow roots in the practice of state courts and that the doctrine was not used to dismiss cases involving local parties until the 1950s.
2023
Maria Glover of Georgetown Law wins CJRI's "Best Article Prize"
The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, is Maria Glover of Georgetown Law for “Mass Arbitration,” published in the June 2022 issue of the Stanford Law Review. The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. Glover’s article develops the first and only case study of Mass Arbitration and provides a taxonomy of the results. What emerges is not a variation on old themes but, instead, a new and distinct model of dispute resolution. The investigation reveals significant ways in which the Mass Arbitration model challenges conventional wisdom about individual claiming and provides new perspectives on the relationships among private procedural ordering, public procedural reform, and civil justice.
July 2022
Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law wins CJRI’s “Best Article Prize”
The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, is Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law for “Qualified Immunity’s Boldest Lie.” The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. Professor Schwartz’s article combines heroic data collection efforts with a deep and thoughtful analysis of the implicit (and often incorrect) empirical assumptions at the foundation of the qualified immunity doctrine in the United States, which shields police officers and others, from liability for constitutional violations in many instances.