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 2026 prize went to Eva Vaillancourt, Ph.D. in History, for her paper, "Birth of the British Crosswalk: Mystical Lines, Mechanical Obedience, and the Puzzle of Law-as-Infrastructure."
Abstract: When the first legalized pedestrian crossings appeared in Britain in 1934, most people found them baffling, if not a little absurd: how do painted lines on the pavement protect you from oncoming cars? They don’t, one comedian remarked: “But if a car kills you while you are standing in it, the police won’t blame you.” This paper traces the genealogy of the crosswalk idea back to the powerful techno-authoritarian imaginaries of interwar Europe and the United States. It then follows the crosswalk's early career in London, where commentators conflated the country's spiraling traffic safety crisis with a wider critique of liberal democracy and its seeming inability to meet modern problems. In the later-1930s and 40s, the logic of this new legal technology was hashed out in a series of tort cases which turned on questions of the body in time and space (what does it mean to behave "reasonably" in newly-motorized streets?), but also on wider questions about law itself. Is following the state’s rules enough to satisfy your duty of care to your fellow man? Can state regulation replace moral and situational judgment, effectively “automating” the unstable human relationships on which social reproduction depends? Finally, can we rely on legal rules to deliver a person safely from one side of the street to the other, in the same way we’d trust a bridge to deliver us safely across a river? In short, are legal rules a form of infrastructure? This paper argues that Britons' struggle to answer this question signaled a wider reconfiguration of the scope and possibilities of regulation, the lived experience of law, and the crisis of the liberal subject in technological modernity. Their desire to “automate” the unstable relationships of interwar liberalism gave rise to a new form of governmentality which, paradoxically, did exactly the opposite: placed uncertainty, and the consciousness of risk, at the core of those relationships.