SOAS scholar wins the 2020 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship

10 September 2020

Dr Yu Mou, Lecturer in Criminal Law at SOAS has won the Peter Birks Prizes for Outstanding Legal Scholarship .

Dr Mou’s book, The Construction of Guilt in China: An Empirical Account of Routine Chinese Injustice was announced as prize winner during the Society and Legal Scholar’s annual conference on Wednesday 2nd September 2020.

The Construction of Guilt in China examines the functional deficiency of the Chinese criminal justice system in preventing individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. The book ‘gets directly into the heart of the Chinese criminal justice’. Its detailed analysis of the criminal process ‘brings a fresh understanding of the centrality of police dossiers in the construction of criminal cases in China’. It has been regarded as ‘an important piece of scholarship within the field of comparative criminal law and justice’.

The Peter Birks prize offers two prizes for outstanding published books by scholars in their early careers. The value of the prizes will be £1,000 for the first prize and £300 for the second prize.

The Society of Legal Scholars was established in 1909, and ‘is the learned society for those engaged in law teaching and/or legal scholarship. The Society is legal education’s principal representative body to the professional bodies and the Government.’