CSLS awarded its first annual graduate student paper prize in Spring 2022. The CSLS paper prize is awarded to a current Berkeley graduate student whose nominated paper best represents outstanding law and society research and addresses one or more of the Center’s areas of scholarly focus: criminal justice, democracy and civil society, or inequality. We had an outstanding pool of nominated papers for the prize, which comes with an award of $1,000.
The 2024 prize went to Caylee Hong, a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, for her paper, Urban Oil Afterlives: Reckoning with Risk and Responsibility in the Los Angeles City Oil Field.
Abstract: For over a century, Los Angeles (LA) has extracted, refined, and consumed vast quantities of petroleum. Yet as active drilling wanes, as land becomes increasingly scarce, and as affordable housing shortages reach record levels, cities must confront the legacies of oil production. This demands accounting for how law co-produces urban infrastructures like oil wells, and with those infrastructures, new kinds of uncertainty and risk. In Vista Hermosa, a neighborhood a mile north of downtown LA, residents have sought to decommission hundreds of wells in one oil reservoir, the “LA City Field.” According to residents, the wells buried alongside their homes, schools, and parks are dangerous despite not producing oil for decades. This article explores the foundational role of law in creating this legacy of deserted urban oil wells; the work of residents to make visible Vista Hermosa’s petroleum past; and the effects of rapid real estate development in the neighborhood.