Click here for the 2023 eligibility guidelines and application!
Founding and early LatCrit board members—including, inter alia, Sumi Cho, Angela P. Harris, Margaret E. Montoya, and Francisco Valdes—imagined and launched the Student Scholar Program (SSP) in 2002–03 to diversify the legal academy of the United States, and other nation states, with scholar activists from historically underrepresented communities.
LatCrit awarded its first cohort of LatCrit Student Scholars in spring 2003, and in the ensuing decades, the SSP has helped more than a dozen awardees obtain, and promote through, tenure-track positions at law schools and other university departments in the United States and Canada. Other SSP awardees work daily to realize human rights and other forms of social justice as activists, advocates, and attorneys throughout and beyond the Americas.
Any graduate or professional student enrolled at an accredited university—throughout the world—is eligible to apply for the SSP. (In some years, the SSP has also accepted applications from people who have earned such a degree within the last several years.)
Successful applicants generally receive:
1. Reimbursement for reasonable expenses related to traveling to and from the LatCrit/SALT Faculty Development Workshop and Biennial LatCrit Conference—which is next scheduled to convene in early October 2023;
2. in-kind contributions covering the cost of conference registration, double-occupancy lodging (with another Student Scholar), and meals;
3. the opportunity to present their scholarship during a concurrent panel of the Biennial LatCrit Conference;
4. the opportunity to submit a revised version of their original essay for publication in in a LatCrit symposium law review issue; and
5. an introduction to a volunteer faculty mentor to assist in their professional development.
LatCrit generally issues the call for SSP applications in the spring semester prior to the Biennial LatCrit Conference. If you would like to receive notice when LatCrit next calls for SSP applications, contact either of the SSP coordinators, Professor Marc-Tizoc González, gonzalezm@law.unm.edu, and Professor Emerita Guadalupe Luna, gluna1@niu.edu.
The SSP application mostly consists of an applicant’s:
1. Curriculum vitae or resume;
2. brief (e.g., one single-spaced page) personal statement explaining:
a. how the SSP will further their intellectual and professional goals, and
b. how they will fulfill the SSP’s primary objective to diversify the legal academy with activist scholars from historically underrepresented communities; and
3. original, unpublished paper, of no more than 10,000 words, on any topic related
to critical sociolegal theory and praxis, identity, and the law that they are willing to
submit for publication in a volume of LatCrit scholarship.
An incomplete listing of SSP alumni, including links to some of the essays they published
through the SSP, is available here.
