To support the next generation of socio-legal scholars studying topics related to Asia, the Asian Journal of Law and Society (AsianJLS) and the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) have jointly established an annual competition for the best paper in the field of law and society written by a graduate student.

1. Eligibility

To be eligible for this competition, a paper must meet the following criteria.

A. The author is a candidate/student enrolled in a postgraduate degree program in law, social sciences, or other related disciplines in an institution of higher education at the time of submission;

B. For a co-authored paper, all authors must comply with item A above;

C. The paper was written and completed during the author’s/authors’ candidature in the above-mentioned postgraduate program;

D. The paper must be written in English;

E. The paper should be on a topic related to law and society in Asia, but excellent papers on socio-legal theory, method, or comparative topics between Asia and other regions will also be considered.

2. Submission procedure

Send submissions to as a Microsoft Word document to ajlseditors@sjtu.edu.cn. In the submission email, please include “AJLS-ALSA 2025 Competition” in the email subject line, and indicate that (1) you intend to be considered in the competition, (2) you are currently a student in a postgraduate program, and (3) you have not submitted your article to the AsianJLS or any other journals for publication. Submissions are limited to one paper per student. Submissions must include a title page with the author’s institutional affiliation, mailing address, email address, an abstract of no more than 200 words, and a word count of the paper. The total length of submissions, including footnotes and references, must not exceed 10,000 words.

3. Deadline for submission

11:59 PM, 31 July 2025 (Shanghai time, GMT+8)

4. Announcement of results

Around mid to late September 2025.

5. Award ceremony

An award ceremony will be held at the closing session of the 2025 ALSA Annual Meeting on 13 December 2025 at Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia.

6. Award benefits

The Winner paper will be published in the AsianJLS after revisions. If there is any Honorable Mention paper, the paper will be invited for submission to the AsianJLS (with no guarantee of publication). The Winner recipient will receive a cash prize of U$150 from ALSA and U$150 worth of book vouchers provided by the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies (CISLS), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Winner and Honorable Mention recipients will receive free ALSA membership for the two calendar years of 2026 and 2027. They will also be provided the opportunity to work at CISLS either as student Research Associate or as Postdoctoral Fellow.

The 2025 AsianJLS-ALSA Graduate Student Paper Competition

Selection Committee Members

Prof. Shitong Qiao, Law School of Duke University (Chair)

Prof. Shen Wei, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Prof. Matthias Vanhullebusch, Faculty of Law, Hasselt University

Prof. Takeshi Akiba, School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University

Specially invited reviewer: Prize Winner 2024 Xinyi Ma (Peking University Law School)

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.

2025 Winner: Amalina Yasmin Binti Mohd Sokri (Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University) for “Rethinking Judicial Legitimacy: A Process-Based Perspective From Malaysian Corruption Trials”.

2025 Honorable Mention: Arpeeta Shams Mizan (University of Bristol Law School) for “Patriarchy and Legal Consciousness: Tracing the Muslim Male Gaze on Cis and Trans Women in Bangladesh”.

Past winners:

2024:

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

Honorable Mention was given to 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."

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".