To support the next generation of socio-legal scholars studying topics related to Asia, the Asian Journal of Law and Society (AsianJLS) in 2021 launched an annual competition for the best paper in the field of law and society written by a graduate student and from 2022 this prize has been co-sponsored by the Asian Law & Society Association. 

The author must be a student enrolled in a postgraduate program in law, social sciences, or other related disciplines when the paper was submitted. Coauthored papers with one or more faculty members are not eligible, but coauthored papers by two or more graduate students are eligible. Papers focusing on law and society in Asia are especially encouraged, and excellent papers on other socio-legal topics will also be considered.

All submissions are evaluated by a committee consisting of AsianJLS editors and invited experts. 

The author(s) will receive USD$150 cash provided by the Asian Law & Society Association and USD$150 e-books provided by Cambridge University Press and the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies (CISLS), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The winner's paper will be published in the journal after revisions. Any Honourable mention recipient will also be invited for submission to the journal (with no guarantee of publication). The authors of the winning paper and any Honourable mention will also be given two years of free Asian Law & Society Association membership and offered the opportunity to work at CISLS either as student Research Associate or as Postdoctoral Fellow for two years.

2024 Winner: Xinyi Ma (Peking University Law School) for "Beyond Repeat Players: Judicial Suggestions for Tech Giants and Relational Governance in Chinese Courts."

2024 Honorable Mention:  Sampurna Das (Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi) for "Tenure Relations in River Islands: Understanding Land Law and Conflict in Northeast India."

Past winners:

2023

The 2023 winners were Junshu Ye & Xinrui Li (Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University) for "Beyond Cultural Interpretivism: Analysis of the Deprivation of Land Rights of Married Out Women in Rural China."

Honorable Mention was given to Hongquan He (School of Law, Tsinghua University) for "The Effectiveness of Administrative Litigation Reform in China: A Case Study of 580,000 Judgment Records."

2022

The 2022 winner was Achalie Kumarage (a PhD Candidate at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University) for "Collective voice without collective bargaining: Pandemic induced wage theft claims and worker responses in apparel supply chains." 

Honourable Mention was given to Xiangyi Ren (a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago) for "Divergent forms of knowledge production and law-making in China".

2021

Salwa Tabassum Hoque (a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (NYU)) for "Law and Digitality: Tracing Modern Epistemologies and Power".