Professor Émilie Biland-Curinier wins the W. Wesley Pue Book Prize

The Canadian Law and Society Association awarded the 2024 W. Wesley Pue Book Prize to Émilie Biland-Curinier, Full Professor at the Sciences Po Center for the Sociology of Organisations, and a member of the Gender Studies Programme.

The W. Wesley Pue Book Prize is awarded annually for the best book on law and society published in the previous year in English or in French. It recognises new, outstanding work in law and society scholarship in Canada or by Canadian authors.

Permanent faculty member Émilie Biland-Curinier has been chosen as a laureate for her book published in 2023 at the University of British Columbia Press, entitled: Family Law in Action Divorce and Inequality in Quebec and France.

This book reveals the class and gender inequalities embedded in the process of separation and its aftermath in Quebec province of Canada and in France. Drawing on empirical research conducted on their respective court and welfare systems, Émilie Biland-Curinier has analysed how men and women in Quebec and France encounter the law and its representatives in ways that affect their personal and professional lives. While gender inequality is less pronounced in Quebec than in France, and class inequality is starker, in both national contexts inequalities after breakups are driven by the same three mechanisms: access to the law and justice, interactions with legal professionals, and the ways these two factors shape lifestyle and standard of living. Decades after the liberalisation of divorce, this book unearths the legal precedents and machinations that continue to result in these striking inequalities.

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Émilie Biland-Curinier is a Full Professor at the Sciences Po Center for the Sociology of Organisations, and a member of the Gender Studies Programme.