Multiple APSA awards for ‘The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe’

July 4, 2023

Congratulations to Tommaso Pavone, one of our newest faculty members, for receiving two book awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his book, The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

The C. Herman Pritchett Book Award is given by the Law & Courts Section of APSA to the best book on law and courts written by a political scientist and published in the previous year.

The European Politics and Society Best Book award is given by the European Politics and Society Section of APSA to the best book on European politics and society published by a political scientist in the previous calendar year.

The Pritchett award committee praised Pavone’s book by highlighting how it “amasses an impressive array of data, including quantitative, ethnographic, and case studies drawn from France, Germany, and Italy to demonstrate how lawyers have effectively “ghostwritten” a judicially activist European Union that is both locally grounded and Euro-centrist in reach. In Pavone’s story, lawyers are political actors who are a conduit for ideas and interests that transform both local and higher law, challenging the conventional wisdom that often centralizes judges as the sole driving forces of this significant reshaping of state power.”

The Ghostwriters reconstructs how entrepreneurial lawyers promoted the development of the European Union by encouraging clients to challenge national laws and mobilize domestic courts against their own governments. The book has now won a total of six prestigious awards from three scholarly associations, including APSA, the Law and Society Association (LSA), and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). It has been praised as “the most important book on European legal integration in decades” and a “stunning achievement” (in reviews by Mark Pollack and Charles Epp). Pavone is only the second social scientist to have won both APSA’s Edward Corwin Award for best dissertation in law and politics as well as APSA’s C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and politics.

The award reception will take place on September 1st, during the APSA annual meeting to be held this year in Los Angeles, California.