Felice Batlan, professor of law and the associate dean for faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has been awarded the 2016 J. Willard Hurst Award from the Law and Society Association. The award honors the best book published in the past year on socio-legal history.
Professor Batlan was honored for her book Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). The judges for the award stated that Professor “Batlan challenges her readers to think more critically about what it means to practice law and how historians write about the history of lawyering. Women and Justice for the Poor is a remarkable feat of historical excavation and reinterpretation.”
Professor Batlan has been on the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law since 2006, after teaching at the Tulane University Law School. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Dr. Batlan is a graduate of Harvard Law School and holds a Ph.D. in history from New York University.