Created in 2005, the Jean Carbonnier Prize awarded by the Robert Badinter Institute recognises work from a thesis or first book on law or justice, regardless of the humanities or social sciences discipline concerned.

The 2025 Jean Carbonnier Prize has been awarded to Nathan Rivet for his thesis entitled ‘Forming the State through privatisation. The use of the private sector in French prisons’, supervised by Jérôme Pelisse and defended on 15 November 2024 at Sciences Po Paris. Read the thesis abstract (in french)

Nathan Rivet also won the 2025 first prize for theses from the Court of Auditors and the 2023 young author prize from the Revue Française de Socio-Économie for his article entitled ‘In search of competition. The State faces the challenge of privatising its prisons’.

Nathan Rivet is an associate researcher at the CSO, a researcher at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs and a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Congratulations on this new award!