Eun Hye Kim is the winner of the ASCOLA Best Junior Paper Award 2026. Her paper has the title “Measuring Incremental Change in the Case Law: A Reliability and Validity Analysis Using the Rasch Model”. The jury says: “This paper constitutes a genuinely innovative and highly accomplished contribution to legal scholarship. By applying a sophisticated quantitative methodology to the study of the evolution of European court jurisprudence, it moves beyond traditional narrative accounts of doctrinal change and offers a rigorous empirical framework for assessing shifts in judicial reasoning. The work establishes a new vocabulary for the study of judicial evolution and opens important avenues for future research. Its methodological ambition, technical execution, and scholarly maturity are exceptional. Eun Hye Kim may rightly be proud of a piece of work whose sophistication would be impressive in any senior academic, and is all the more remarkable in a junior scholar.”
Eun Hye is a Lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK. The jury was composed of professors Fabiana Di Porto (chair), Thomas Cheng and Peter Picht.
The photo shows Thomas Cheng and Eun Hye Kimi during the Award Ceremony at the ASCOLA Annual Conference in London in July 2026. Congratulations! You can find all winners of ASCOLA Best Junior Paper Awards here.