Professor Kunal Parker has been awarded the John Phillip Reid Book Award for his exceptional monograph, The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press 2024).
The John Phillip Reid Book Award is one of the highest honors in the field, given annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar in Anglo-American legal history.
Parker’s book is hailed as a brilliant intellectual history that explores a fundamental transformation in American academic thought. His work documents how social science thinkers across law, political science, and economics from 1870 to 1970 shifted their focus. Instead of emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths, they increasingly concentrated on methods, techniques, and processes.
The Turn to Process insightfully shows how this major epistemological shift was deeply entwined with the rise of the administrative state.
The award citation praises the book as "highly effective" and "very creative," noting that it "places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority." Parker's book was previously honored when Balkinization, a legal blog focused on constitutional, First Amendment, and other civil liberties issues, selected the book for one of its symposia in 2024.
Beyond winning the prestigious book award, Professor Parker has also been invited to assume the co-editorship of the Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society (with Christopher Tomlins of Berkeley Law), one of the two leading legal history book series in the United States.
Parker is a Dean’s Distinguished Scholar and associate dean for intellectual life at the University of Miami School of Law. His teaching areas and interests include American Legal History, Estates and Trusts, Immigration and Nationality Law, and Property.
