We are delighted to announce the winner of the first nationwide Undergraduate Essay Prize in German Studies at Ohio State. From a wealth of excellent submissions, reflecting on the vibrancy of our field, the committee selected Sonam Kotadia’s insightful study of the neglected legal aspects of Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy, Emilia Galotti. Lessing’s play, which premiered in Braunschweig in 1772 and continues to be performed regularly on stages in Germany and beyond, is known for its critique of aristocratic tyranny and its (controversial) representation of resistance, embodied in Emilia’s request to her father to kill her in order to save her from forcibly becoming the Prince’s mistress and from succumbing to her own professed moral weakness.

Sonam Kotadia, a senior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Spring 2017, majoring in German and Global Studies, proposes that the play also criticizes then-traditional positive law––“law given and legitimatized by the proclamations of an authority figure”––and defends the concepts of natural law and of a reformed legal positivism emerging in the 18th-century, which defined law as based on natural human morality (or knowledge of morality), to be upheld by the sovereign, with the aim of maintaining the “social and civic order.”

Ms. Kotadia has written a timely essay in a period of intense debates about the powers of legal and political authority.