Magill Awarded by American Constitution Society for Administrative Law Scholarship

June 26, 2009 — University of Virginia law professor Elizabeth Magill has won the Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law, the American Constitution Society announced Thursday.

"It's an honor. I'm so flattered to have my work recognized in this way," Magill said. "Judge Cudahy has made great contributions to my field and he is a wonderful judge. It is a special honor to receive an award named after him."

Magill took first place for her article "Standing for the Public: A Lost History," in which she recovers the history of a surprisingly liberal standing doctrine that existed in the middle of the 20th century.

The doctrine, which is in tension with modern standing law, allowed Congress to authorize parties to "stand for the public," or to "bring the government's legal errors to the attention of the federal courts," Magill said.

"The article tells the (complicated) tale of how the courts erased the standing for the public principle from the case law, places those actions action in context by looking at contemporaneous developments in the legal profession and Congress, and speculates about why this approach to standing law died when it did," Magill wrote in the abstract of the article, which is scheduled to be published in the Virginia Law Review.

The Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition seeks to identify legal scholarship that shows "a keen grasp of legal doctrine, deep insight into the institutional forces that determine how doctrine is implemented, and an appreciation of the public impact of doctrinal and institutional choices, including the consequences for fundamental values such as fairness, participation, and transparency," according to the American Constitution Society.

During the 2009 American Constitution Society Convention, Tim Freilich, a 1999 graduate of the U.Va. School of Law, was awarded the first-ever David Carliner Public Interest Award.


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