USC GOULD — Professor Ariela Gross and co-author Alejandro de la Fuente of Harvard University were recently honored with the Order of the Coif Book Award for Becoming Free Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia and Louisiana (2020, Cambridge University Press). The award was presented at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January 2022. The book, researched and written over 10 years, explains through historical accounts how enslaved and free people of color in three slave societies used the law to gain freedom and citizenship for themselves and their families. “It’s especially meaningful for this historical work to be recognized by my fellow legal scholars because one central aim of the book was to show how important law and legal institutions were to the creation of racial regimes in the Americas,” said Gross.