University of Miami Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Kunal M. Parker has been awarded the John Phillip Reed Book Award by the American Society for Legal History, for his monograph

The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

The full list of this year’s awards is here: https://aslh.net/aslh-book-prize-winners-2025/

Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process is a brilliant intellectual history of how social science thinkers in law, political science, and economics between 1870 and 1970 stopped emphasizing ostensibly knowable truths and focused instead on methods, techniques, and processes. Parker shows how this transformation was entwined with the rise of the administrative state. After documenting this major epistemological shift, he argues that during the Cold War, once-supple claims about the importance of process and method were narrowed and decontextualized, playing oppositional roles to democratization, civil rights, and managed capitalism. This highly effective, very creative book places law, as practice and as a field of inquiry, in a larger context and illuminates essential questions about the history of knowledge and intellectual authority