Mona Alsaidi LAW ‘22 took top honors in the 2022 Scribes Law Review Award with her Comment, Legally White, Effectively Othered: Recognizing and Investing in Arab American Communities, 94 Temple L. Rev. 99 (2021).
The Scribes Law Review Award is a national prize presented annually for the best student-written article in a law review or journal. Roughly ten articles are selected each year and submitted to a group of law professors who are tasked with choosing a single winner. Each article is judged on four main criteria: quality of writing, topic, research, and footnotes. Selected articles should be “clear, succinct, and forceful,” writes Western Michigan University Cooley Law School Professor Joseph Kimble, a long-time Scribes member.
“As an Arab American, the topic of this piece has always been personally important to me,” said Alsaidi. “I have often thought about the need to create and provide space and resources for the Arab American community. So, when I had the opportunity to research the topic, I was glad to take it! I am so honored to have received this award and am thankful to everyone who advised me and provided me feedback throughout the writing and publishing process. I would be remiss if I did not mention my gratitude to my advisor, Dean Ramji-Nogales for her guidance and support, Allan Carlsen and Anna Johnson for nominating and believing in my piece, and the Temple Law Review staffers for their hard work in preparing my piece for publication!”
Alsaidi is currently the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund Legal Fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. While at Temple Law, she served on Temple Law Review as a Staff Editor and then as the Lead Articles Editor. Reflecting on her TLR experience, Alsaidi wrote that she and the Articles team “were able to think about inclusivity and legal scholarship, while learning both from the literature we were reading and from each other.”
“We are delighted that Mona’s Comment has been selected as the winning article,” said interim Dean Rachel Rebouché. “Her Comment exemplifies the creative, thoroughly-researched, and beautifully-written scholarship published by the Temple Law Review. Mona’s writing has made a tangible, lasting impact and we are incredibly proud that Mona is a member of our law school community.”
Read more about Mona Alsaidi, who was highlighted as part of Temple Law’s Class of 2022 Graduate Spotlight series, here.