UH Law Professor Joe Sanders Honored with Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize

Aug. 04, 2026 —Joseph Sanders, the A.A. White Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, is the recipient of this year’s Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize, the Law and Society Association’s highest honor for lifetime achievement in empirical research examining the relationship between law and society.

Sanders, a nationally recognized scholar, was selected for a career that has spanned nearly five decades and helped shape understanding of how courts, scientific evidence and public perceptions of responsibility interact within the legal system. In announcing the award, the LSA cited “his landmark work in law and social science, which ranges from pure sociology and social psychology to deep sociolegal research.”

“I have always been interested in how law and legal ideas actually interact with and are shaped by the society around them,” Sanders said. “The best thing about being a law professor is that one can be interested in many issues over the course of a career.”

The association highlighted Sanders’ theoretically insightful, “An Invitation to Law and Social Science,” coauthored with Richard Lempert. It also noted his extensive research on mass tort litigation. His examination of the Bendectin birth-defect lawsuits produced a series of influential articles and the book “Bendectin on Trial: A Study of Mass Tort Litigation,” which explored how courts evaluate complex scientific claims and expert testimony. The research emerged during a period when the U.S. Supreme Court was grappling with standards governing the admissibility of scientific evidence.

Building on that work, Sanders co-edits “Modern Scientific Evidence,” a multivolume reference widely used by judges and attorneys navigating technical issues in litigation.

The association also cited Sanders’ comparative research with V. Lee Hamilton, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, on how individuals assign responsibility for wrongdoing in different cultures. Their cross-cultural surveys in Japan, Russia and the United States led to numerous scholarly articles and the book “Everyday Justice: Responsibility and the Individual in Japan and the United States.”

Beyond his scholarship, Sanders has actively supported the LSA over the years, serving as editor and book review editor of Law and Society Review, one of the field’s leading journals.

A member of the UH Law Center faculty since 1983, Sanders teaches courses on law and society, products and liability, scientific evidence, torts and toxic torts. He earned his J.D. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.