Communication and Law Division
Interest Group Awards
Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA's large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.
Read more about this Interest Group.
Distinguished Publication Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | David A. Frank & Francis J. Mootz, "The Rhetoric of Judging Well: The Conflicted Legacy of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy" |
| 2022 | Amy Pasen & Patrick File, “Protesting with guns and conflating the First and Second Amendments: The case of the Bundys," published in First Amendment Studies in 2021. |
Top Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Susan Sarapin, "Perception vs. Reality: Robed in the Appearance of Impartiality, the Roberts Court Dispenses the Mere Appearance of Justice" |
| 2021 | Marissa Fernholz, "Informal Institutions and Victimage: Brett Kavanaugh’s "'We Don't Need to Get to the Foreign Policy Issue': Judicial Agnosticism in INS v. Doherty" |
| 2020 | Hilary Rasmussen & Megan Lambertz-Berndt, "Informal Institutions and Victimage: Brett Kavanaugh’s “Riveting” Defense of the American 'Every-Man'” |
| 2019 | Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University; Pamela L. Morris, Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus; and Richart Ledet, Troy University, "Exploring Perjury in a Post-truth Era: Public perceptions of Lying under Oath and the Influences of Media, Religiosity, and Politics” |
| 2016 | Ian P. Dunham, Rutgers University, “Municipal Broadband: The Struggle for a Grassroots Policy Framework” |
| 2016 | Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University; Pamela L. Morris, Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus; Benjamin George, University of North Texas; Jeffrey Hamburg, Independent Researcher; Ngoc Vo, Troy University, “Real People Don’t Read Standard-Form Contracts: Contract Law’s Duty to Read and Predicting Users’ Intentions to Read Online Click-Through Agreements” |
| 2016 | Susan Tanner, Carnegie Mellon University, “Intertextuality in Three Supreme Court Privacy Cases: An Analysis of Process and Agency” |
| 2016 | A. Jay Wagner, Bradley University, “Controlling Discourse, Foreclosing Recourse: The Creep of the Glomar Response” |
| 2015 | Sarah Marie Staggs, University of Arizona, "Content Analysis of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity Frames: Liberal vs. Conservative Media" |
| 2015 | Mikaela Malsin, University of Georgia, "Dissenting to Dispassion: Harry Blackmun’s Opinion in "Callins v. Collins" and the Place for Pathos in Judicial Rhetoric" |
| 2015 | Emily Winderman, North Carolina State University, "Materializing Abortion's 'Back Alley': Rhetorics of Moral Disgust in the Grand Jury Report of Kermit Gosnell's 'House of Horrors'" |
| 2015 | Craig R. Smith, California State University, Long Beach, "Preemptive Apologias in the Judicial Context: Chief Justice Rehnquist’s Concurrence in Bush v. Gore" |
| 2014 | Anjali Vats, Indiana University, “(Dis)owning Bikram: Anti-colonial rhetorical praxis in the yoga wars" |
| 2014 | Stephanie Madden, University of Maryland, "Crisis, Compliance, and Campus Safety: The Clery Act and Temporal Ambiguity in Campus Emergency Alerting" |
| 2014 | Marouf Hasian Jr., University of Utah, "The Blackwater Prosecutions, Kafkaesque Critiques of Violence, and Nisour Square Amnesias" |
| 2013 | Christopher Terry, “Reviewing the 2010 Review: Radio New Production and a Three Market Data Solution” |
| 2013 | Anna Young and Jeremiah Hickey, “Beyond Supreme: Retired Justices as Public Intellectuals” |
| 2013 | Cynthia Conti, “Lived Realities of LPFM Service Rules: Slippage Between Regulation and Practices” |
| 2013 | Laurance Paul Strait and Garry Padrta “Protecting the Freedom of Systematically Distorted Speech: The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Decision” |
| 2012 | Seung-Hwan Mun, Northeastern Illinois University, “A Tale of Two Worlds: A Comparative History of Authorship in Europe and China" |
| 2012 | Carlo A. Pedrioli, Barry University, "Constructing Modern-day U.S. Legal Education through Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, and the Scholar Model of the Law Professor Persona" |
| 2012 | Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University, "Forget about It! The Ironic Effects of Instructions to Disregard Perry, Ben, Gil, and Ducky" |
| 2012 | Karen Tracy, Univ of Colorado, Boulder, “Oral Argument in State Supreme Courts: Justices’ Views of the Practice" |
| 2011 | Christopher Seaman, University of California, Santa Barbara; Daniel Linz, Univ of California, Santa Barbara, "Indecency in the 21st Century: Revisiting the Assumptions of the Regulation of Indecent Broadcasting" |
| 2011 | Nick Merola, Univ of Texas, Austin; Vysali Soundararajan, University of Texas, Austin, "Interrupting Justice: Interruptions in Supreme Court Proceedings" |
| 2011 | Susan H. Sarapin, Purdue University; Emily Haas, Purdue University; Scott McWilliams, Jurinex Legal Services; Rahul Mitra, Purdue University; Melanie Morgan, Purdue University, "Optimizing Voices from the Witness Box: The Effects of Physician-Defendant Testimony on Findings of Nurse- Defendant Negligence in Medical Malpractice" |
| 2011 | Matthew Thornton, Louisiana State University, "The Case of Corrupted Coverage - Press Coverage and Framing Effects of the Citizens United Decision" |
| 2010 | Susan Sarapin (Purdue University), Glenn Sparks (Purdue University), “The Viewing of TV Crime Drama and the 'CSI Effect': There’s a Verdict Hanging in the Balance" |
| 2010 | Carlo Pedrioli (Barry University), “Respecting Language As Part of Ethnicity and Business Necessity As Part of Business: Title VII and Language Discrimination at Work” |
| 2010 | Mary Lynn Veden (University of Washington), “Taming the 'Living Constitution': William H. Rehnquist’s Legal Polemic and the Discursive Forms of 'Judicial Activism” |
| 2009 | Ryan Malphurs (Texas A&M University), “Could You Hear Me above the Laughter? The Role of Laughter at the U.S. Supreme Court” |
| 2009 | John Reinard (California State University, Fullerton), “An Experimental Study of the Use of Voir Dire Questions to Preview Case Elements and Promote Positive Attitudes Toward Defendants” |
| 2009 | Jeremiah Hickey (St. John's University), “Visions of Democracy: Partisanship, Race, Self-Government, and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation” |
| 2009 | Jennifer Andrus (Carnegie Mellon Univ), “From Event to Text: The Effects of Entextualization in/on the Excited Utterance Exception to Hearsay” |
| 2008 | Michael K. Middleton (University of Utah), Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. (University of Utah), “Scott Panetti, The Legal Characterizations of Rights of the Mentally Ill, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Involvement in Public Debates About the Abolition of Capital Punishment” |
| 2008 | Debra L. Worthington (Auburn University), “Causation, Negligence, Credibility, and Presentation Influence: Testing for the Camera Perspective Bias in the Civil Trial Context” |
| 2008 | David Tschida (St. Cloud State Univ.), “Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency: The unCONVENTIONal Rhetoric of Environmental unCERTAINTY" |
| 2008 | Amanda J. Davis (Univ of Texas, Austin), “Private Persuasion, Public Denial: Politics, Torture and the Interpretation of Law” |
| 2007 | Jody Lynee Madeira (Harvard Law School), “Blood Relations: Collective Memory, Cultural Trauma, and the Prosecution and Execution of Timothy McVeigh” |
| 2007 | Mardi J Kidwell (Univ of New Hampshire), Esther Gonzalez Martinez (Université de Fribourg), “The Soft Accusation Interrogation Method: A Look at Turn-taking” |
| 2007 | Catherine L. Langford (Texas Tech Univ), "Appealing to the Brooding Spirit of the Law: Argumentation in Judicial Dissents” |
| 2006 | Paul Stob, Univ of Wisconsin, Madison, "Chisholm v. Georgia and the Rhetoric of Representation." |
| 2006 | Debra L. Worthington, Auburn University; Gary R. Giewat, Giewat Litigation Consulting, "To Be Fair and Impartial or Honest and Candid? An Empirical Test of Introductory Statements Encouraging Self-Disclosure." |
| 2006 | Susan Jennifer Szmania, Univ of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Monica L. Gracyalny, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, "A Communicative Analysis of Victim Impact Statements in the Case of the Green River Killer: Practice and Policy Implications." |
Top Student Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Jiebing Liang, "'We are Dancing in Chains': Chilling Effects of Content Creators in Chinese Social Media" |
| 2021 | Christine Swartz, "Section 230 on Social Media: How it Could Impact Political Advertising" |
| 2020 | Smita Misra, "At the Crossroad Between Laborer and Refugee: Configuring the Contemporary American Asylum Seeker" |
| 2019 | “Blurring the Lines: Impersonation of the Press by Law Enforcement in the United States” Scott Memmel, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities |