Jasmine E. Harris, a professor of law in Penn Carey Law, was named the recipient of the 2025 John Hope Franklin Prize in the Law & Society Association’s annual awards.

Each year, the LSA honors leading international scholars for their groundbreaking publications and contributions to the study of law and society. This year, twenty award winners were recognized.

Ms. Harris was named a co-winner of the 2025 John Hope Franklin Prize–recognizing exceptional scholarship in the field of race, racism, and the law–for “The Political Economy of Conservatorship,” published in the UCLA Law Review.

“As an interdisciplinary scholar, it is truly an honor to receive the John Hope Franklin Award from the Law & Society Association for my work at the intersection of disability and race,” said Ms. Harris. “Disability labels have played a prominent role in state-sponsored subordination and economic and political control over racialized populations. Conservatorship is an extraordinary legal device that strips individuals of legal capacity and personhood.”

Ms. Harris’s article reinterprets conservatorship as a tool of racial and economic subordination, weaving legal history, disability theory, and racial critique into an incisive analysis of how disability law has been used to extract labor and property from Black and Indigenous communities.

“By connecting conservatorship’s historical deployment to its contemporary operation, Harris exposes the system’s deep-seated structural harm,” said the LSA in its profiles of 2025 award and prize recipients. “Her article exemplifies socio-legal scholarship at its finest and proposes an abolitionist framework with broad implications for race, disability, and legal reform.”

Ms. Harris is a law and inequality scholar with expertise in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. Her work addresses the relationship between law and equality, focusing on the law’s capacity to advance social norms of inclusion in the context of disability. She consults with federal and state lawmakers and legal advocates on legislative and policy reforms related to disability laws. She also serves on the board of directors for the Arc of the United States and as chair of the legal advocacy subcommittee, which advises the organization on impact litigation.