With this little note I’d like to announce the foundation of the Crawford Prize Academy.

I thought it would be good to have some kind of body or entity to support the James Crawford Prize for International Dispute Settlement. So, why not, I created it.

The Crawford Prize Academy is a forum for present and previous James Crawford Prize winners. The mandate of its members is to act as ambassadors for the Prize and to possibly be part of the Prize Committee, which awards the prize.

From now on, the Prize Committee will be composed of a maximum of 11 members: up to 6 of them will be drawn from the Academy, the 5 others will be the four General Editors and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Dispute Settlement.

As ambassadors of the Prize, the members of the Academy are expected to spread the word about the prize and to encourage scholars to submit a paper for it.

The current members of the Academy are:

• Fuad Zarbiyev, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (winner of the 2012 prize)
• Richard Oppong, Thompson Rivers University (winner of the 2014 prize)
• Joshua Karton, Queen’s University (winner of the 2015 prize)
• Pietro Ortolani, Max Planck Luxembourg (winner of the 2016 prize)
• Jean d’Aspremont, University of Manchester and very soon Sciences Po Paris (winner of the 2017 prize)

A warm thank you to all of them. Kind thanks also go to Oxford University Press, for their sponsorship of the prize, and of course to James Crawford.

This should be fun!