UniSC Law Lecturer Dr Dale Mitchell was recently announced as the winner of the 2022 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for his thesis using adaptation analysis as a means of re-reading and re-imagining law.

Dale said he was “incredibly honoured” to discover his doctoral thesis "Forms of Law: The Adaptive Affordances of the Cultural Legal" was awarded the prestigious prize.

Dale is in some very prestigious company, with most of the previous winners coming from Ivy League universities such as Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Brown. In fact, Dale is the first person from the Southern Hemisphere to receive the award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

This prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

“I am indebted to the generations of law and humanities scholars who have forged the path on which my thesis builds,” he said. “Glad to bring this prize home for the Aussies!”

Along with this award, Dale also received an honorary mention from the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia for his paper It’s Law: Towards a Form of the Cultural Legal, which is forthcoming.