The Walton H. Hamilton Prize
The Executive Board of the Yale Journal on Regulation is pleased to announce that, effective for Volume 26, all articles published in a given volume of the Journal will be eligible to receive the Walton H. Hamilton Prize for Outstanding Scholarship.
The Hamilton Prize, totaling $1500, will go to the article most likely to have a significant impact on the study and understanding of regulatory policy. One Walton H. Hamilton Prize will be given out per volume of the Journal. An annual award ceremony will take place at the Yale Law School in April, beginning in 2009.
The selection process for the Hamilton Prize will be distinct and separate from the review of original submissions for publication. To determine the recipient, the Executive Board will evaluate articles on their originality, scope, analytical elegance, and appeal to a broad audience. The Executive Board may consult with outside experts to determine the contribution of a piece to a given field of study. Recipients of the Hamilton Prize will be notified in late March of the year in which they were published.
Please address all questions about the Walton H. Hamilton Prize to Natalya Shnitser and Bryan Townsend, Editors-in-Chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation. They may be reached at natalya.shnitser@yale.edu and bryan.townsend@yale.edu
About Walton H. Hamilton
Walton Hale Hamilton (1881-1958) was the Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 1928 to 1948. Though an economist by training and not a lawyer himself, Hamilton astutely applied the insights of institutional economics to critique legal formalism in such classic works as The Ancient Maxim Caveat Emptor, 40 YALE L.J. 1133 (1931), Affectation with a Public Interest, 39 YALE L.J. 1089 (1930), and The Path of Due Process of Law, 48 ETHICS 269 (1938). Furthermore, Hamilton undertook industry studies that showed how neoclassical economics failed to consider the ability of social contexts to yield noncompetitive wages and prices even in the presence of market forces.Among other courses, Hamilton taught torts. Years later, his teaching materials on the topic, assembled by Dean Harry Shulman into the SHULMAN & JAMES casebook, introduced a first-year law student named Guido Calabresi to economic analysis in the legal context, leading to Calabresi’s groundbreaking work, Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts, 70 YALE L.J. 499 (1961).
In the 1930s Hamilton was a frequent advisor on New Deal economic policy. He eventually left Yale to become a full time deputy to Thurman Arnold at the new Antitrust Division of the Justice Department and thereafter, to join Arnold’s newly created Washington, D.C. law firm, Arnold, Fortas & Porter.
PDF copy of Walton H. Hamilton Prize Announcemnet
PDF copy of Walton H. Hamilton's Biography