There was no Pulitzer prize for fiction awarded in 2012. This decision not only upset eligible authors, but it also was terrible for bookstores. By failing to award a prize, the Pulitzer committee had essentially sent the message to the broader public that there weren’t any new novels worth reading that year. As a result, book sales suffered across the board.
I was thinking about this example when I attended a talk a few weeks ago for one of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, Abhijit Banerjee. The audience filled an auditorium that’s probably normally used for plays or concerts (I actually have no idea what usually happens in the auditorium; it took an economics talk being scheduled in the space for me to learn it existed). Although economists are revered here at the University of Chicago, that kind of audience is still extremely unusual.
Abhijit’s talk not only highlighted his own research projects, but also the work of many other economists. It thus not only increased the awareness of the randomized control trials on development that this year’s laureates are now famous for, but the discipline as a whole.
Without his recent publicity for winning the Nobel, however, I’m confident that Abhijit would have spoken in front of a few dozen people instead of a few hundred. (One reason for that confidence: space was not a concern when Oliver Hart presented at our law and economics workshop in a basement seminar room just before he won the Nobel Prize in 2016.)
By failing to have major prizes like other academic disciplines (not to mention literature, music, and movies), legal scholars miss out on the opportunity to highlight our work to the broader public. This not only deprives recognition for the superstars at the top of our profession that would win the award, but also means that the public will not be exposed to legal scholarship more generally. Or, in other words, by not establishing a signature prize, we are sending the message to the broader public that there isn’t any legal scholarship worth learning about. But instead of sending that message one year, we send it every year.