Two Stanford Law students have been awarded prestigious writing prizes from the Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC), which hosts an annual international competition that draws entries from around the globe. Gilat Juli Bachar and Itay Ravid, both JSM ’13 and first-year JSD students, were honored during the Third Annual YCC Global Conference in April at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. The conference, held at a different law school each year, honors younger scholars in all areas of comparative law, both public and private. These scholars are then invited to submit an abstract on any subject of public or private comparative law.

Bachar was the inaugural recipient of the Colin B. Picker Prize for the most meritorious paper written by a graduate law student for “The Occupation of the Law: Power Dynamics Between the Israeli Judiciary and Legislature Over Controlling Palestinians’ Tort Claims Against IDF.” Ravid received an honorable mention for his paper, “Watch & Learn: Representation of Illegal Behavior and Obedience to Legal Norms Through the Eyes of Popular Culture, The Case of TV Shows Broadcasted in Israel.”

“We were excited and honored to be acknowledged by the 2014 Younger Comparativists Global Conference,” said Bachar and Ravid in a joint statement. “We truly appreciated the opportunity to represent SLS and the JSD program in this distinguished forum and we thank the SLS faculty members who supported us in the process of producing these papers.”

They were two of only three students so honored by the YCC this year.

“The judges—who rated the papers that had been submitted for the prize without knowing the authors’ identities or schools—were apparently surprised to discover that both awardees were Stanford students. Of course, I wasn’t, because I know our students are all terrific, but it is wonderful to have external validation and very exciting for these young and most deserving scholars,” says Deborah R. Hensler, Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution and associate dean for graduate studies.