For multiple reasons, both intellectual and selfish, I obviously agree with Adam that it would be cool to have a major legal scholarship prize that brought attention and prestige to law professors. But this raises the question of what it takes for a prize to actually succeed at these kinds of social goals.
For instance, some law professors do win the kinds of major prizes Adam mentions — Danielle Citron and the MacArthur Award; James Forman and the Pulitzer Prize, to give two recent examples off the top of my head. But these don’t have the effects Adam describes on the entire discipline.
An obvious, if completely impractical, strategy is to try to convince the Nobel Foundation to add a new category for law. But that brand is tightly controlled and I’m not sure the Nobel Foundation would much interest in, or good judgment about, American legal scholarship.
A giant sum of money always helps. With a 20 million dollar endowment, roughly enough to create a 1 million dollar prize, any prize would rapidly be the focal point for the legal academy. But failing that, I’m not sure we know exactly how to establish a focal prize in a field that doesn’t have one. Except, perhaps, through experimentation. For instance, the Georgetown Center for the Constitution has started awarding a Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize (of $50,000) every year. Will it one day have the status of the Pulitzer Prize among law professors?