News & Press

LSA Mourns the Loss of Former President Marc Galanter

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:18:00 GMT

Marc Galanter
1931-2026

Richard Abel
UCLA School of Law

Marc Galanter, who died on April 14, was the Law and Society Association from its very beginning. But his story starts before its launch. Inspired in high school by Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, he applied early to the University of Chicago (where Adler, a philosopher, was the first non-lawyer to teach in a law school). Placing out of two years of college by passing entrance exams in six of the 14 required courses, Marc graduated at 19 and started graduate school in philosophy. But after completing his M.A., he felt that philosophy was too abstract and followed the example of his good friend Saul Mendlovitz by going to law school, first at Penn and then for his last two years at Chicago, where he edited the law review’s book review section. Hans Zeisel was conducting his pathbreaking jury study, Soia Mentschikoff was studying on arbitration, and Marc became a mentee of Max Rheinstein. Graduating in 1956 (and expecting to be drafted), Marc stayed at Chicago on a Bigelow Teaching Fellowship, co-teaching a seminar on the legal profession with Alan Barton, a sociologist on the jury project, who later directed Columbia University’s Center for Applied Social Research. Stewart Macaulay, another Bigelow fellow (and LSA founder and stalwart), connected Marc to a program on South Asia at Stanford Law School, which offered him a two-year fellowship. He won a Fulbright fellowship and, inspired by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education, spent a year studying India’s abolition of untouchability, finding that its efforts to deal with the “Scheduled Castes” (analyzed in his definitive 1984 book “Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India”) prefigured affirmative action in the U.S.

At loose ends after another year at Stanford, he accepted the offer of a one-year position teaching Sociology 3 at the University of Chicago, which led to a three-year contract, renewed for another three, and then tenure (a trajectory anticipated by David Riesman, another lawyer turned sociologist without any formal training). Marc’s scholarly home was the burgeoning South Asia program; he had no contact with the law school except his former mentor Max Rheinstein. In 1967, Marc re-encountered Lawrence Friedman at a conference at the East-West Center in Honolulu. (Lawrence had graduated from Chicago before Marc matriculated, but had known Lawrence’s wife Leah there.) Marc accepted an invitation to observe the course Lawrence and Stewart Macaulay had pioneered at Wisconsin (later embodied in their 1969 book “Law and the Behavioral Sciences”). Excited to find “somebody looking at [American] law in a way that felt like what I was doing in India, an outsider perspective on law,” he devoured the rapidly expanding interdisciplinary literature and constructed a year-long law-and-society course with two colleagues: June Tapp (psychology) and Mark Haller (history). Bernard “Barney” Cohn (an Indianist historian and anthropologist writing about law) introduced Marc to Richard “Red” Schwartz (a sociologist) and Paul Bohannan (an anthropologist), both at Northwestern University. The four met for lunch four times a year, leading Red, then Law & Society Review editor, to ask Marc to edit the papers from a conference he had organized on the Indian legal profession for a special double issue.

Before the Law and Society Association held its inaugural 1975 meeting at Buffalo Law School, it organized sessions at the annual conferences of the APSA and ASA in Chicago; the 20-member LSA board (almost the entire field at the time) also met in Chicago; Marc attended all those meetings. Lawrence introduced him to David Trubek, with whom Marc served on the board of the new International Legal Center. In the fall of 1970, Dave brought Marc to Yale Law School as a senior scholar in the Law and Modernization Program, recently given a five-year grant by USAID. Their collaboration led to an influential article: “Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States.” Although an earlier cohort of social scientists who taught as adjuncts—Schwartz, Jerome Skolnick and Philip Selznick—had left, Yale had hired Stanton Wheeler (the first social scientist tenured by any law school), who directed the Russell Sage Program (which included Donald Black, Austin Sarat, Malcolm Feeley, Jack Katz, Jerrold Guben, and Robert Kagan, among others). Robert Stevens—a Yale law professor who had written seminal books on English lawyers and taught in East Africa—led a seminar on the legal profession in which Marc participated. And this is when I met Marc, forming a friendship memorialized by a photo he took of me with our two oldest children at the circus in New Haven and has lasted the rest of his life. Yale is also where Marc completed the first draft of “How the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead.” After reading it, I wrote Marc that Americans now had our own Max Weber (having just encountered “Economy and Society”).

After a year back in Chicago, Marc accepted an offer of a visiting professorship at Buffalo Law School (where Red had become the first non-lawyer dean in the country) and the offer of tenure that followed. When he sent out the revised “Haves” manuscript, it was rejected by the Law & Society Review, the American Political Science Review, and at least a half dozen major law journals. A Yale Law Journal student editor wrote Marc that the article was “fascinating and well-written” but mistaken because courts could advance the claims of “have-nots.” When Marc became the LSR editor, Red suggested he announce a special issue and appoint an editor. Marc chose Robert Kidder (an anthropologist working on India) and Bliss Cartwright (a quantitative methodologist at Buffalo), who jumped at the chance—and it became the thirteenth “most-cited law review article of all time” (according to a 1996 article). Marc started teaching contracts, mentored by his new Buffalo colleague Stewart Macaulay. Marc taught in the NSF Law and Social Science Workshop in Madison in the summers of 1968 and 1969, getting to know other Wisconsin faculty members: Joel Grossman and Stuart Scheingold (political science) and Jack Ladinsky (sociology). Stewart (who had returned to Wisconsin) and Dave Trubek (who had gone there from Yale) convinced the university to invite Marc to visit, after which he accepted a tenured position, attracted by the law and social science faculty and the major South Asian studies center. The rest is history—or bibliography.

Looking back on his Fulbright year in India, Marc reflected: “Immersion in another culture is a celebrated method for exposing our presuppositions and showing us that familiar arrangements are problematic rather than the way things have to be.” I wrote something similar at the beginning of my career:

The increased understanding to be gained by such intellectual exploration seems to me similar in origin to the pleasure any of us takes in travel. Differences of physical environment, modes of social intercourse, or patterns of culture awaken us to phenomena which at home are so familiar to as to be almost invisible. When we resume our mundane round, the residue of such impressions compels us to recognize the contingency of our own ways, and leads us to look for explanations.

(Marc published that article, “A Comparative Theory of Dispute Institutions in Society” in LSR. It was the longest ever until he nominated me as his successor and I published Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada.”) I am struck by how many of our generation turned to social science to understand law after living and working in a foreign environment: David Trubek (Brazil), Stewart Macaulay (Chile), Richard Schwartz (Israel and India), William Felstiner (Turkey and India), Robert Kidder and Robert Hayden (both India), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Brazil), myself (Kenya), Laura Nader (Mexico), and her students in the Berkeley Village Law Project: Michael Lowy (Ghana), June Starr (Turkey), Barbara Yngvesson (Sweden), Klaus-Friedrich Koch (Egypt), and Harry Todd (Germany). Marc felt that two of his major papers—“Haves” and “Justice in Many Rooms—could be seen as transpositions to the U.S. of insights he had attained in India. Similarly, both Marc’s “The Modernization of Law” and “The Displacement of Traditional Law in Modern India” constructed ideal types of tradition and modernity based on the encounter between East and West. Marc’s accounts of the Bhopal litigation implicitly contrast it with litigation in the U.S.

Although Marc focused on ascriptive categories in India, it was only in 1999 that he published an article about Jews in the American legal profession. (He had been raised in a Yiddishkeit household.) It took Rajeev Dhavan, who edited Marc’s India articles for book publication, to note how much his “focus on pluralism and accommodation reflect a (then) barely articulated concern about Jewish identity and continuity.” In 2001 Marc collaborated with Jayanth Krishnan on a comparison of the ways in which Israel and India dealt with religious personal law.

Civil litigation has been one of Marc’s constant foci. The “Haves” article has been reprinted in numerous collections, translated into Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese, and was the subject of a symposium on its 25^thanniversary. He devoted several articles to puncturing the myth propagated by the insurance industry and deep-pocket tort defendants that Americans are excessively litigious. One of those articles, “Reading the Landscape of Disputes,” was the 65^th most cited law review article in 1996. Marc's interest in litigation naturally led him to study its variants and alternatives. The massive differences between the mythic version of American law he absorbed in law school and the actual functioning of law he observed in India led him to argue, in “Justice in Many Rooms,” that legal pluralism, not monism, was the norm. This seminal article also was reprinted and translated into multiple languages. Looking through eyes opened by India, Marc perceived not only that the United States contained an enormous diversity of dispute institutions and processes but also that even its formal legal system necessarily operated in informal ways.

Marc’s interest in litigation was naturally complemented by an interest in lawyers, which dated from 1956. When the popular press began investigating the profession, especially its upper reaches, Marc wrote a 1983 article about “mega-lawyering,” which led to his collaborations with Thomas Palay on law firm growth in the U.S. and with Simon Roberts about the parallel, but different, phenomenon in the U.K. Marc extended those ideas in his work on the aging of the profession, gender differences, and the growing numbers of lawyers around the world. Just as he had debunked claims about contemporary litigiousness, so he disabused nostalgic visions of a golden age of the American legal profession.

Marc liked entertaining his numerous appreciative audiences with jokes. Irreverence, incongruity, and the counterintuitive have always been his modus operandi. He started collecting lawyer jokes unsystematically, visiting used books stores in each of the (many) cities he visited during his peripatetic lecturing, eventually amassing over a thousand volumes. Then, at a dinner hosted by Jerome Carlin in Berkeley, he met Alan Dundes, America’s leading scholar on humor. As their close friendship developed, Alan guided Marc through the world of jokes, resulting in Marc’s book “Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture.”

This small selection from Marc’s six books and over a hundred articles displays multiple connections despite the diversity of topics and sites: India is related to the United States, religion to caste, litigation to judging and alternative dispute settlement, and lawyers to jokes. Marc is a hoarder, never throwing anything out—not a clipping, not an article, and certainly not an idea. They get filed in libraries spreading over three floors of his Wisconsin home (to which he gave me a tour recently), where he recombines them to produce new dishes with exotic flavors and, as always, a great presentation. He constantly debunks received wisdom.

Just as Marc insists on pluralism rather than monism, he shows that every social institution and process has perverse, often unanticipated, consequences. The pursuit of equality creates its own inequalities (a vulnerability Trump and MAGA continue to exploit). Formal law cannot function without informal processes. The tournament of lawyers contains the seeds of its own destruction (attested to by recent law firm collapses). Marc internalized E.M. Forster’s exhortation: “only connect.” And in doing so, he has connected with us and all of us with each other.

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In 2011, the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley Law conducted an interview with Marc as part of the Conversations in Law and Society Series. The interview, along with other conversations with foundational figures in the field, is available here: https://csls.berkeley.edu/research-resources/conversations-law-and-society

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We would like to create an informal space for our community to express condolences and honor Marc’s memory. If you would like to share, please submit a comment below.

Call for Nominations: LSA Executive Committee & Board of Trustees

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:24:00 GMT

It’s that time of year again! The Law and Society Association is now accepting nominations for the next President-Elect, Secretary-Elect, and Class of 2029 Board of Trustees.

If you know an LSA member—including yourself—whose passion for law and society research is matched only by a capacity for strong leadership and meaningful collaboration, please take the time to submit a nomination for an LSA leadership role here. LSA members will elect the new class of Trustees later this fall.

LSA is governed by an elected Executive Committee and a 24-member Board of Trustees. Trustees serve a three-year term, with a new class elected annually. The representative receiving the highest number of votes will serve as their class representative on the Executive Committee.

We welcome and encourage nominations of candidates who represent a diverse range of intellectual backgrounds, experiences, expertise, and nationalities.

When submitting your nomination, please include information that will assist the committee in selecting a diverse slate of candidates. This may include the nominee's current involvement in LSA activities, such as:

Service on LSA Committees
Leadership/participation in LSA CRNs or IRCs
Previous LSA leadership roles as an Officer or Trustee

The deadline to submit nominations is Monday, April 6th. There is no limit on the number of nominees a member can submit. If you wish to nominate more than ten candidates, please contact the LSA Executive Office at lsa@lawandsociety.org.

Submit a Nomination Here >>

LSA Announces the Michele Bratcher Goodwin Fellowship in Law and Society

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:57:00 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – As of January 2026, the Law and Society Association has renamed the LSA Student Fellows Program as the Michele Bratcher Goodwin Fellowship in Law and Society. LSA Past President Michele Goodwin, the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, whose term was defined in part by her commitment to mentoring emerging scholars, conceived of the fellowship as a mechanism for deepening graduate student engagement in the Association’s work and Annual Meeting planning, while also offering valuable professional development and mentorship opportunities.

The inaugural fellows, Kia Turner and Vicente Mata, Jr., began their terms in 2025. Over the next two years, Kia and Vicente will serve on the LSA Annual Meeting Program Committee, where they will help review submissions, assist with panel formation, and participate in other committee work. In addition, they will provide mentorship to the next cohort of student fellows. Each fellow will receive a $2,000 annual stipend, as well as $750 to offset travel to the Annual Meeting.

Each fall, LSA will select two new fellows to serve a two-year term. Current students who are interested in applying are encouraged to watch for the call for applications in late summer/early fall.

We are deeply grateful to Michele Goodwin for her vision and leadership in creating this program, and we look forward to seeing the continued impact of the fellowship on our student members and the broader LSA community.

LSA Welcomes its First Student Fellows Cohort

Tue, 2 Dec 2025 13:44:00 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of its LSA Student Fellows Program: Kia Turner (Stanford University, Yale University) and Vicente Celestino Mata, Jr. (Cornell University). Originally envisioned by Past President Michele Goodwin, whose leadership and commitment to mentoring emerging scholars made this initiative possible, the Fellows Program is designed to deepen graduate student engagement in the Association’s work and Annual Meeting planning, while offering valuable professional development and mentorship opportunities.

As Fellows, Kia and Vicente will spend their two-year term (2025-2027) on the LSA Annual Meeting Program Committee, helping to review submissions, assisting with panel formation, and participating in other committee work. In addition, they will provide mentorship for the next cohort of student fellows. They will also receive a $2,000 annual stipend, as well as $750 to offset travel to the Annual Meeting.

Kia Turner is a doctoral candidate in education at Stanford University and a J.D. student at Yale Law School. She received her master’s degree in education at Harvard University, where she also attended as an undergraduate. Kia’s research, which focuses on the intersection between law, education, and democratic flourishing, is informed by her background as a middle and high school teacher, as well as her work with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She has previously presented at the LSA Annual Meetings in 2024 and 2025, and is currently assembling a cohort of fellow law and society-oriented students at Yale to submit to and attend the 2026 Annual Meeting in San Francisco—an effort she intends to extend to additional law schools in the future.

Vicente Mata is a Ph.D. candidate at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, with a research focus on immigration and the criminal legal system. His dissertation examines how broader geopolitical trends, in which humanitarianism is co-opted by state and political interests, have historically and currently shaped political discourse on immigration – including the attacks on refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the implementation of restrictive anti-immigrant policies at the U.S.-Mexico border. Vicente has a master’s degree in social ecology from the University of California, Irvine, and in sociology from the University of California, Merced, as well as a bachelor’s degree in sociology and Chicano/a Studies from California State University, Fullerton. He is currently the project manager for a $1.62 million research project involving monetary sanctions and shadow costs of the criminal legal system, funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, Haynes Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. He has presented at LSA Annual Meetings in 2025, 2022, and 2020. As a formerly incarcerated youth, scholar of color, and first-generation college student, Vicente intends to spend his career mentoring other diverse and marginalized students interested in pursuing academia.

Each fall, LSA will select two new fellows to serve a two-year term. If you are a current student and interested in applying to be a future fellow, keep an eye out for the call for applications in Late Summer/early Fall.

Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association Revived with One-Day Conference

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:43:00 GMT

On October 4, 2025, law and society scholars from the east coast region of the United States gathered at Ramapo College of New Jersey for the first Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association (MALSA) conference in nearly ten years. Sponsored by the Law and Society Association Advance Grant Program and the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs, the free event featured 30 presentations on contemporary sociolegal issues.

One of the standout sessions of the day was a professional development panel, “Novel Approaches to Teaching Law and Society at the Undergraduate Level.” During the panel, participants shared multiple creative classroom presentations before exchanging observations about AI’s impact on critical reading and writing skill development among their students. New York University Professor Christine B. Harrington’s keynote address, “Gender Wars: What’s Law Got to Do with It?” reflected ongoing concerns about rule of law and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the United States.

Speakers and audience members engaged in meaningful conversations at each presentation, highlighting just how much the MALSA conference had been missed. The small, regional affair allowed undergraduates and other young scholars to learn about academic research presentations in an intimate, less overwhelming setting, while reminding all attendees about the depth and range of law and society research happening in their backyards. Invigorated by the successful meeting and determined not to let another ten years slip by, Ramapo Professors Atieh Babakhani, Sangha Padhy, and their fellow organizers intend to make the conference an annual occurrence. By meeting every year, the region’s sociolegal scholars will be able to cultivate and maintain fruitful networks of intellectual connection and academic support.

LSA Announces Class of 2028 Board of Trustees

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:42:00 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its newly elected Class of 2028 Board of Trustees!

Each year, LSA members elect a class of eight individuals for board service. The representative with the most votes will serve as their class representative on the Executive Committee. The following winners will serve for a three-year term ending in 2028:

Monica C. Bell (Class Representative)>>

Yale University

Meera E. Deo>>

Southwestern Law School

Howard S. Erlanger>>

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jonathan Liljeblad>>

Australian National University

Qian Liu>>

University of Calgary

OTA Shozo>>

Meiji University

Mary R. Rose>>

University of Texas at Austin

Michael W. Yarbrough>>

The City University of New York

To learn more about LSA leadership, click here.

LSA Announces 2026 Advance Grant Program Recipients

Thu, 2 Oct 2025 17:06:00 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its 2026 Advance Grant Program recipients!

The Advance Grantees, who received a total of $265,000 this year, will foster new programming opportunities for members beyond the flagship Annual Meeting and Early Career Workshops, enhancing LSA’s efforts to promote sociolegal scholarship as a global field. The recipients will develop conferences, seminars, and workshops that will facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge production among participants across the globe.

Congratulations to all of the 2026 grant recipients, and thank you to everybody who submitted proposals to enrich the LSA community. Program news and applications will be available in our monthly newsletters, on our blog, and on our various social media channels. To support future LSA grant funding initiatives, please contribute to the LSA Endowment Fund here.

2025 LSA Advance Grant Recipients:

Catherine Albiston and Pamela Erickson | University of California, Berkeley

Penelope Andrews| New York Law School

Atieh Babakhani and Javiera Araya-Moreno | Ramapo College of New Jersey

Tugba Basaran | University of Cambridge

Melissa Crouch | University of New South Wales, Sydney

Deepa Das Acevedo and Kenneth Carter | Emory University

Cynthia Farid | Global Young Academy

Julie Ham | Brock University, Rashmee Singh | University of Waterloo, and Menaka Raguparan | UNC Wilmington

Mark Fathi Massoud | University of California, Santa Cruz

Robert Nelson | Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation and Mark Suchman | Purdue University, American Bar Foundation

Natalia Niedmann Alvarez | University of Chicago and Maj Grasten | Copenhagen Business School

Gabriel Pereira | National University of Tucuman, CONICET and Leigh A. Payne | University of Oxford

Jamie Rowen and Paul Collins | University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Eraldo Souza dos Santos | University of California, Irvine

Nkatha Kabira | University of Nairobi and Chantal Thomas | Cornell University Law School

Program Descriptions:

Catherine Albiston & Pamela Erickson, “Meeting to Establish the International Consortium of Socio-Legal Centres”

Most law and society scholars recognize the importance of cultivating strong international connections among faculty and students, not just to facilitate exchange and cross-national collaboration, but also to pool and leverage resources—financial, intellectual, and otherwise—to support shared goals. The steps necessary for doing so, however, such as gathering information, identifying interested colleagues, and finding institutional support for visits and programming, are often prohibitively challenging.

Catherine Albiston and Pamela Erickson, Faculty Director and Executive Director (respectively) of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, are taking the first steps to address this by holding a meeting to establish an International Consortium of Socio-legal Centres. Shortly after the LSA 2026 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, ten or more representatives from established law and society centers and institutions will convene to develop a consortium structure and agreement, with the goal of formally launching in advance of LSA’s Global Meeting on Law and Society in 2027. By institutionalizing the consortium and providing a template of materials for interested scholars to form law and society centers at their own universities, Professors Albiston and Erickson expect to see greater expansion within the field.

Penelope Andrews, “Challenges to the Rule of Law and Democracy: A Series of Constitutional Conversations in International Perspectives”

Rule of law and democracy have been increasingly threatened in recent years, with electoral integrity, judicial independence, and institutional trust particularly under attack. These global challenges pose an existential and physical threat for those who are economically, politically, and socially marginalized, as well as anybody who values the existence of recourses to address human rights abuses. Law and society scholars, with their critical and interdisciplinary methods and outlooks, are uniquely positioned to examine these circumstances—which is why New York Law School Professor Penelope Andrews is developing a series of symposia and individual lectures for the fall 2025 and spring 2026 semesters. By highlighting LSA scholarship and engaging both emerging and established academics in the field, Professor Andrews seeks to both deepen and expand the foundation of sociolegal knowledge necessary for understanding and transforming the modern world.

Atieh Babakhani & Sangha Padhy, “Reviving the Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association”

Nearly a decade after its last conference in 2015, the Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association (MALSA), a regional network of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of law and society, is reviving the event on October 4, 2025. Approximately 100 participants, including undergraduate and graduate students, early career researchers, and legal professionals, will meet to present their works-in-progress, network, and workshop ideas. The smaller, more approachable environment is perfectly suited for students and young professionals hoping to prepare for larger-scale conferences like the LSA Annual Meetings. Ramapo College of New Jersey Professors Atieh Babakhani and Sangha Padhy intend to turn the MALSA conference into an annual event, establishing the mid-Atlantic United States as a regional hub for collaboration, programming, and fellowship for law and society professionals seeking social and professional support, especially during periods of political pushback. By lowering financial and logistical barriers, Professors Babakhani and Padhy aim to sustain a more inclusive and dynamic law and society community.

Tugba Basaran, “Spatial Justice in the Americas”

CRN 35 (Critical Legal Geography) and the CLG Collective are joining forces to develop two programs aimed at advancing spatial justice in the Americas. Under the leadership of University of Cambridge Professor Tugba Basaran, the 2026 International Conference of Critical Legal Geography, which will take place at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile in March of 2026, will unite approximately 100 scholars to center and amplify Latin American legal geographic thought, focusing on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and spatial legal pluralism. The 2027 Summer School on Indigenous Legal Geographies will convene 15 to 25 academics, early-career researchers, and graduate students for intensive training and support, with a focus on topics related to Indigenous legal traditions, geographies, environmental relations, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and posthumanism. With their grounding in respect for epistemic pluralism, these two programs will open pathways for collaborative research, teaching, and public engagement.

Melissa Crouch, “The Military as a Legal Actor: Sociolegal Approaches and Perspectives”

While the military is a subject of focus across the social sciences, the ways that militaries use law, and the implications of this for civilian legal institutions, have received less attention from law and society scholars. To address this, UNSW Professor Melissa Crouch is leading the creation of a three-day workshop about the role of the military as a legal actor. Early/mid-career LSA members who are from the Global South and based at universities in Asia and the Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia will use the workshop to engage in exploratory discussions and generate preliminary research on the militarization of legal institutions and processes widely assumed to be civilian. In addition to presentations and peer feedback sessions, attendees will participate in one-on-one mentor sessions and explore the challenges of doing qualitative sociolegal field work in authoritarian and militarized settings.

Deepa Das Acevedo & Kenneth Carter, “LSA Talks! Public Scholarship Program”

Law and society scholars conduct research and produce knowledge with the potential to improve communities at the local, regional, and national levels. But sharing that knowledge with non-academic audiences—and making them care—is an entirely different skillset. To address this, Emory University Professors Deepa Das Acevedo and Kenneth Carter are launching the “LSA Talks” program. The yearlong, mostly virtual project will equip participants to engage productively with wider audiences through a series of workshops and exercises about concepts related to credibility, persuasion, concision, clarity, and information formatting. The program will conclude with an in-person, intensive capstone session at the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Cynthia Farid, “Knowledge Under Threat: Scholar-Activism, Risk, and the Architecture of Support and Knowledge Mobilization in the Global South”

Critical scholarship and activism often go hand-in-hand, but the lived realities of engaging in such work are challenging, especially within repressive and authoritarian contexts. Scholar-activists, or “scholactivists,” especially those in the Global South, face political repression, institutional fragility, structural exclusion, academic surveillance, travel/funding expenses, and digital suppression. Global Young Academy member Cynthia Farid is spearheading a workshop series to lay the groundwork for a permanent, decentralized network of Global South scholactivists to conduct grounded, context-sensitive conversations, support collaborations and mentorship, and develop alternative models of knowledge production and mobilization. The workshops will connect scholars, activists, institutions, and communities in rural and marginalized areas to discuss topics such as burnout, surveillance, care ethics, risk-mitigation strategies, formalism vs. activism, southern epistemologies, and institutional gatekeeping.

Julie Ham, Rashmee Singh, & Menaka Raguparan, “Cultivating Community-Academic Collaborations with Sex Worker Communities”

CRN 06: Sex, Work, Law and Society Co-Chairs Julie Ham (Brock University), Rashmee Singh (University of Waterloo), and Menaka Raguparan (UNC Wilmington), are holding their Annual Day of Dialogue on May 27, 2026, immediately before the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. This year’s event will feature an Action Research Xchange, where sex worker rights organizers will hold discussions and build the foundation for ongoing academic-community collaboration. In particular, participants will discuss urgent issues facing California sex workers, including ICE crackdowns, legislation on loitering and eviction, structural violence, and the threat of neighborhood displacement due to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. They will also discuss mentorship for sex work researchers and sustainable futures for sex worker rights organizations.

Mark Massoud, “Building the Disciplines with Law and Society”

University of California, Santa Cruz Professor Mark Massoud’s LSA 2025 thematic panel, “Building the Disciplines with Law and Society,” united scholars from multiple disciplines in a discussion of law and society’s impact on other fields. Given the panel’s success, Professor Massoud is expanding the project, calling upon scholars of anthropology, economics, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, religion, and women’s/gender studies to discuss how law and society has benefited from and contributed to their fields and predict trends in the upcoming generation of scholarship. Researchers will meet for a two-day workshop immediately before the 2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Hong Kong, after which the conversation will be maintained through publications and online thematic workshops.

Robert Nelson & Mark Suchman, “Emergency Funding for the ABF/LSA Doctoral Fellowship Program”

For the last 17 years, the American Bar Foundation (ABF) has partnered with the Law and Society Association to support emerging sociolegal scholars through the ABF/LSA Law and Social Science Fellowship and Mentoring Program on Law & Inequality. After five rounds of successful grant renewals, however, the National Science Foundation (NSF) abruptly canceled funding mid-award with no warning, no explanation, and no opportunity for remedy. Thanks to swift action from Professors Robert Nelson (Northwestern, ABF) and Mark Suchman (Purdue, ABF), LSA will be able to provide emergency grant funding to fill in the gap, allowing fellows to continue developing dissertations and disseminating urgent, cutting-edge research on law and inequality.

Natalia Niedmann Alvarez & May Grasten, “Establishing the Global Law & Social Reproduction Network”

Just before the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting in Chicago, 20+ scholars of feminist legal theory, feminist economics, political economy, legal history, and sociology convened for a workshop on how law and legal institutions influence the organization and valuation of social reproduction. The enthusiasm and intellectual energy was so palpable, fostering connections across jurisdictions, disciplines, and theoretical traditions, that University of Chicago Professor Natalia Niedmann Alvarez and Copenhagen Business School Professor May Grasten decided to replicate the event, albeit in a more structured, enduring form. Two conferences, one in Copenhagen in 2026 and the other in Chicago in 2027, will launch the establishment of the Global Law and Social Reproduction Network. The timing could not be better, with current demographic shifts, austerity policies, labor market precarity, and gendered/racialized inequalities contributing to a deepening care crisis that, among other things, poses a threat to sustaining formal economies. The Network’s long-term scholarly infrastructure will support early-career development and ongoing intellectual exchange about how legal frameworks, political economy, and social norms shape the recognition, regulation and distribution of reproductive labor.

Gabriel Pereira & Leigh A. Payne, “The Right Against Rights: An International Workshop on Legal Countermobilization in Latin America”

Over the last two decades, Latin America has seen the growing use of legal strategies by conservative actors to resist, reverse, and redefine recent human rights gains. Legal mechanisms that once advanced inclusion are increasingly being repurposed to reassert social hierarchies and reverse rights expansion, forcing legal scholars to rethink law’s role as a terrain of resistance and reaction in the Global South. National University of Tucumán and CONICET Professor Gabriel Pereira and Oxford University Professor Leigh A. Payne are hosting an international workshop to understand this critical, underexplored phenomenon, known as Right-Wing Legal Mobilization (RWLM). Four closed virtual workshops, two open-access online public lectures, and a collaborative writing process will give participants the opportunity to map and compare empirical cases across different Latin American contexts, while facilitating dialogue on fieldwork and research methodologies and generating conceptual tools for theorizing RWLM strategies.

Jamie Rowen & Paul Collins, “2026 Northeast Law and Society Retreat”

Inspired by the success of regional law and society retreats in the western and mid-western United States, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Professors Jamie Rowen and Paul Collins have decided to host a one-day Northeast Law and Society Retreat at their home institution in October of 2026. More accessible due to its location and size, the retreat will serve as an opportunity for underrepresented minorities in the field to learn more about law and society, participate in breakout mentorship sessions, and learn more about pursuing sociolegal careers. In the afternoon, public plenary sessions will address public engagement, as well as pressing issues related to democracy, authoritarianism, and rule of law.

Eraldo Souza de Santos, “Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars”

Upon joining the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law and Society department, Professor Eraldo Souza de Santos was surprised to learn that his students were primarily training in interviewing and/or causal methodology, with other methods, especially interpretive ones, considered secondary for success. Upon learning that his peers at other institutions faced the same issue, he developed the idea for a virtual, monthly, nine-session workshop series, where graduate students and early-career scholars will supplement their methodological toolkit to include critical approaches rooted in decoloniality, feminism, and black studies, potentially addressing the longstanding divide between social sciences and the humanities.

Chantal Thomas & Nkatha Kabira, “Gender, Law, and Political Economy in Comparative Perspective”

When Cornell University Professor Chantal Thomas and University of Nairobi Professor Nkatha Kabira started the Gender and Political Economy International Research Collaborative in 2020, it was with the goal of developing an international dialogue on urgent issues of gender inequality, law, and politics, while supporting collaboration and research with a global/interdisciplinary consciousness and scope. Their upcoming African Regional Conference on Gender, Law, and Political Economy in Comparative Perspective will support these efforts by uniting 50-75 participants, from both academia and civil society, for 2 ½ days of presentations and workshops on in-progress research, pedagogy, and reform efforts in Kenyan and African contexts. This conference will establish the foundation, not just for a potential special journal issue featuring papers from the event, but also a regional conference model to be replicated in other regions of the Global South.

LSA Mourns the Loss of Former President Samuel Krislov

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 19:12:00 GMT

Samuel Krislov, age 95, died in his sleep at his home in Arlington, Virginia, on August 11, 2025. Sam had a long and illustrious career. Born in Cleveland in 1929, he received his BA and MA at New York University, and his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1955. He taught for short stints at several universities, before moving to the University of Minnesota in 1964, where he taught in the Political Science Department, and held adjunct positions in the School of Law, and the Program in Ancient and Near Middle Eastern Studies, until his retirement in 2001. His long tenure at Minnesota was punctuated by frequent visiting appointments, including at Columbia, Northwestern, Brandeis, and the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. An inveterate comparativist, he received three Fulbright Fellowships and other teaching appointments to more than a dozen universities throughout the world.

Trained in law and politics at Princeton, Sam was keenly active in empirical work in both political science and law. He held many positions and received a number of awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Law and Courts Section Lifetime Achievement Award.

He was even more active in the Law & Society Association. A participant in some of the informal meetings preceding the establishment of the Association, he was present at its founding. He was the second editor of the Law & Society Review, and the fourth president of the Association. During his editorship, the Review expanded from an ad hoc publication to its standard quarterly format, with increased size, readership, and prestige. Under his editorship, it became the journal of choice for scholars interested in empirical research in sociolegal studies. For a number of years, the fiscally insecure Association organized its meetings to run sessions at the conventions of established social science associations. As President of the Association, Sam took the initiative and financial and reputational risk of announcing that he was holding “the first annual” meeting in Minneapolis. It was a smashing success; it drew attention to the Association, increased membership, and annual meetings have been held continuously since then. He also took the initiative to build bridges with the National Science Foundation, which developed a special program to support research in law and the behavioral sciences, a relationship with the Law and Society Association that continues to this day.

Everywhere he went, Sam helped to develop institutions. He chaired the political science department at Minnesota in its heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s. One of his proudest achievements was helping to found the political science department at the then-new University of Tel Aviv. He was appointed by the National Academy of Science to chair its then-new and now on-going Committee on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. He was an active consultant and author for the California Judicial Council’s project on the Future of California Courts. He was president of the Midwest Political Science Association. He was a member of the governing board of the American Political Science Association. He was a frequent visiting lecturer in the Masters of Judicial Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He was a consultant to a great many organizations, local, state, national, and international, where he was always appreciated for his ability to listen, synthesize, and summarize, and in the process sharpen issues and point to solutions.

Sam was also a beloved mentor to generations of students and young scholars at Minnesota and around the world. A quick learner, he could swiftly grasp what someone was trying to get at, and as a result he helped scholars, young and old, clarify their research projects and move forward with a clearer understanding. He did this in the seminar room, on conference room floors, as a consultant, and as an editor.

Sam was quick, curious, and productive. And gregarious. He often saw patterns and implications before anyone else. So far as we know, he published the first game theoretical analysis of coalition formation on the U.S. Supreme Court. His book exploring racial segregation and integration in the federal bureaucracy revealed that older agencies are more resistant to change than newer agencies (e.g. in the 1970s, the Navy was much more segregated than the Air Force). He explored and accounted for this pattern long before the new institutionalists in organization theory began to address the issue. His book and articles on product standards is an authoritative account of the successes of private regulation. Sam’s co-edited National Research Council report forecasting the impact of legislation on courts is the definitive statement on the topic.

In total, Sam published nineteen authored or edited books on a variety of topics, including judicial behavior, the judicial process, constitutional law and history, public administration, alongside dozens of articles on these topics, and still more entries in dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias. Many of them were co-authored or co-edited, and many of his pieces have been reprinted in anthologies. The two of us, his former students, are proud to have been collaborators and co-authors on some of these many projects.

Sam is survived by Judy Gillespie, his wife of four decades, and five children, Sheri, Anne, Dan, Melanie, and Lee with his first wife, the late Donna Krislov. Ever the mentor, he is also survived by the many students who have benefited from his unfailing interest and advice that extended well beyond their middle ages. And ever the collaborator and intellectual partner, he is survived by the Sociologists, Anthropologists, Political Scientists, Economists, and Law Professors whose work was unfailingly enriched by his insights. The scholar of impact analysis, among so many other things, most certainly left an impact on those fortunate enough to have known him. Sam Krislov will surely be missed, but he will even more surely long be remembered.

Malcolm M. Feeley

Claire Clements Sanders Professor, Emeritus

Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program

School of Law

University of California at Berkeley

Keith O. Boyum

Professor of Political Science, Emeritus

California State University, Fullerton

We would like to create an informal space for our community to express condolences and honor Sam’s memory. If you would like to share, please submit a comment below.

LSA Releases Statement on Academic Freedom, Democracy, and Rule of Law

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:45:00 GMT

Amherst, MASS – The Law and Society Association (LSA) Board of Trustees has released a statement addressing the ongoing threats to academic freedom, democratic institutions, and the rule of law around the world.

Read the full statement below:

“Threats to constitutional democracy and the rule of law are escalating in nations around the world. As an international scholarly association, the Law and Society Association fosters the study of legal systems and institutions. We recognize that such developments—whether in the U.S. or globally—pose a serious challenge to the conditions under which scholarly inquiry can thrive. We affirm our commitment to the values of academic freedom, democratic governance, and the rule of law, and we encourage our members to continue their important scholarly work in examining and understanding these pressing issues.”

LSA Announces the Michele Bratcher Goodwin Fellowship in Law and Society

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 13:53:00 GMT

Each fall, LSA will select two new fellows to serve a two-year term. Current students who are interested in applying are encouraged to watch for the call for applications in late summer/early fall.

In Memoriam: Please Share Your Condolences for Former LSA Executive Officer Ronald Pipkin

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:51:00 GMT

The Law and Society Association is sad to report that Ronald Pipkin, a stalwart LSA leader for 25 years, has passed away. Our hearts are heavy with his loss.

Ron’s leadership ushered in a new era for LSA. He believed in our potential to become a leading national and international organization for thought-leaders interested in changing the world. By pouring his efforts into mentorship and pipeline building, Ron helped make our organization a home for an expansive range of scholars and research topics. His example inspired LSA to create the Ronald Pipkin Service Award in 2012.

Ron's legacy teaches us that there is much work to be done in the world—to make it more just, kind, and equitable—whether with our courts, legislatures, in civil society, or the academy. We salute Ron and honor his legacy of service.

We would like to create an informal space for our community to express condolences and honor Ron’s memory. If you would like to share, please submit a comment below.

LSA Announces 2024 Grant Program Recipients

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 18:49:00 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its recipients for its 2024 Grant Programs.

The recipients of LSA’s two grant programs will foster new programming opportunities for members beyond the flagship Annual Meeting and Early Career Workshops, and will enhance LSA’s efforts to promote sociolegal scholarship as a global field. The recipients will design seminars and workshops to facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge production amongst participants.

Congratulations to all of the 2024 grant recipients and thank you to everybody who submitted proposals to enrich the LSA community and enhance sociolegal scholarship. Program news and applications will be available in our monthly newsletters, on our blog, and on X/Twitter @law_soc.

2024 LSA Programming Grant Recipients:

Ari Ezra Waldman | University of California, Irvine

Danielle Rudes | Sam Houston State University

Karina Ansolabehere | Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Javiera Araya-Moreno | Concordia Ethnography Lab

Salvador Andrés Millaleo Hernández | Law School at the University of Chile and João Vitor Cardoso | Universidad Santo Tomás

2024 Global Collaboration Project Recipients:

Suryapratim Roy | Trinity College Dublin and Swethaa Ballakrishnen | University of California, Irvine

Read the Program Descriptions Here!

LSA 2024 Annual Awards Announced

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 18:35:00 GMT

The Law and Society Association Honors its 2024 Award Winners!

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association extends a warm congratulations to the 18 winners of its 2024 Annual Awards.

LSA, which celebrates its 60^th anniversary this year, honors leading international scholars each summer for their groundbreaking publications and contributions to the study of law and society. The association will honor winners at its 2024 Annual Meeting, which takes place June 6-9, 2024 in Denver, CO.

The awards ceremony is scheduled for Thursday, June 6, at 4:45 p.m. MT. Annual Meeting registration is required to attend the ceremony. To view more information about each of the winners, check out our Awards Page.

Read the Full Release Here!

Please Share your Memories of Laurie Edelman

Wed, 8 Feb 2023 16:26:00 GMT

Dear Colleagues,

With the heaviest heart, I write to let you all know that our past-president, generous colleague, and dear friend, Lauren Edelman passed away last night. Laurie became ill in December and had been improving until this week.

Laurie received her PhD from Stanford and her JD from Berkeley before spending the first part of her career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1996 to become the Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Sociology. She held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Laurie’s scholarly research was on law and organizations, law and inequality, workplace discrimination and harassment, symbolic compliance, disputing and rights mobilization, empirical critical race theory, and most recently, disabilities in the workplace. Her recent book, Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights, won the 2018 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association, the 2017 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management, the 2017 Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, and honorable mention for the 2017 C. Herman Pritchett Book Prize from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

Laurie always viewed the LSA as her intellectual home and was a member since 1984. She served as Trustee (1993-1996), Secretary (1997-1999), and President (2002-2003). She received the LSA Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award in 2017; the LSA Article Prize in 2012; and the Harry J. Kalven Prize in 2018. Most recently in June 2022, she completed a 3-year term of the as Class Representative to the Board. She also was one of the founding faculty of the Law and Society Association/National Science Foundation/American Bar Foundation doctoral fellowship in law and inequality.

Laurie loved dogs, made her own beautiful jewelry, and famously asked a certain college football coach, “what is a quarterback?” when he called to tell her she just “had” to change a student’s grade. Her quick and infectious laugh will be missed terribly.

Whether you knew Prof. Edelman personally, spoke with her at a conference or were influenced by her work, we would like to provide this informal space for the LSA community to express their condolences and honor her legacy. If you would like to do so, please submit a comment below.

We will be adding more tributes to Prof. Edelman as they become available. If you come across a tribute that has not been added to this page, please post it in a comment below.

LSA 2023 Annual Meeting Registration is Now Open!

Mon, 5 Dec 2022 19:26:00 GMT

The LSA 2023 annual meeting registration is now open!

Click Here to Register!

Editor Sought for Law & Society Review

Tue, 7 Jun 2022 16:34:00 GMT

The Editor’s Term is for Three years (2023-2026)

The Law and Society Association is seeking its next editor for the Law & Society Review. The Editor Search Committee is eager to receive nominations, including self-nominations, for this important position in the law and society community.

The Editor’s term is for three years (2023-2026) and includes an ex officio appointment to the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee of the Law and Society Association. Given the time needed for transition and the lead time to publication, the new editor should expect to begin receiving initial manuscript submissions beginning prior to the formal start of the term of office. We envision a period of overlapping responsibilities with the current editor handling submissions of revised manuscripts and the new editor(s) handling initial submissions.

Persons interested in learning more about the Editor’s position, expressing interest in the position, or making nominations should contact a member of the Editor Search Committee as soon as possible, and no later than August 2nd (Please include nominees’ e-mail and mailing addresses.) Teams of co-editors are welcome.

Some members of the Editor Search Committee, including the current editor, will be attending the upcoming Meeting in Lisbon (July 13-July 16). If you will be attending the meeting and have thoughts or questions about the position or suggestions about nominees, we encourage you to speak with one of us on the Search Committee.

Committee members are:

Dr. Scott Barclay – Scott.W.Barclay@asu.edu

Dr. Frank Munger – Frank.Munger@nyls.edu

Dr. Anne Bloom – annebloom@law.berkeley.edu

Dr. Jill Weinberg – Jill.Weinberg@tufts.edu

Dr. Sheri-Lynn Kurisu – skurisu@csusm.edu

Dr. Hadar Aviram – aviramh@uchastings.edu

Dr. Rebecca Sandefur – Rebecca.Sandefur@asu.edu

Formal applications or expressions of interest should be emailed to Dr. Frank Munger (frank.munger@nyls.edu) and Dr. Jill Weinberg (jill.weinberg@tufts.edu).

2021 LSA Election Results Announced

Fri, 5 Nov 2021 20:15:46 GMT

LSA announces its Class of 2024 Board of Trustees

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 LSA elections. We appreciate all who took the time to cast a ballot and help shape the future of our association.

We were fortunate to have such an impressive host of scholars featured on this year’s ballot, and LSA would like to thank all the candidates who agreed to stand for election.

Click Here to See the Results!

LSA Statement on U.S. News and World Report's Recent Rejection of "Scholarly Impact" Metric

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:53:35 GMT

The U.S. News and World Report Decided to Reject a Proposed Law School Rankings Metric that Would Have Impacted LSA Scholars

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is pleased to report that the U.S. News and World Report has decided not to proceed with its proposal to add a measure of “scholarly impact” to its law school rankings. This report summarizes the Association’s concerns and actions taken while the metric was under consideration.

The proposed metric for measuring scholarly impact was to be drawn from citations in the Hein database which is comprised primarily of law review articles. The Law & Society Association was concerned with the implications for our members, many of whom write books, book chapters and peer-reviewed articles that appear in and are frequently cited in publications other than law reviews. For that reason, the scholarly impact of our members’ scholarship would not have been accurately represented in the proposed metric. In addition, non-doctrinal and data- driven sociolegal scholarship ordinarily does not amass as many citations as constitutional or purely doctrinal articles do. Moreover, if law schools attempted to game the system to improve their rankings, as has happened with other U.S. News metrics, the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and racial diversity of law school faculties and the range of topics they choose to write on might have been negatively affected.

Click Here to read the full statement.

LSA Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:23:53 GMT

The NSF Grant Will Help Build International Research Collaborations and Provide Funding for Junior Sociolegal Scholar Activities

AMHERST, Mass. – The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Law & Science has awarded the Law and Society Association (LSA) a $298,500 grant to support the Association’s continued role in cultivating a global field of law and society. The grant will help fund, facilitate and foster international collaboration projects and other activities among international scholars that will take place leading up to and during LSA’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. It marks the fourth time in 14 years that the NSF provided the Association with this grant.

The NSF grant will also assist LSA in its commitment to mentoring early career sociolegal scholars, especially those residing in low and middle-income countries. Junior scholar activities preceding the Lisbon conference will include joint mentorship development workshops to share methods, materials and approaches for supporting early career scholars’ research. These initiatives will also feature a series of early career workshops hosted by partner associations and LSA, from which junior scholars will be drawn for travel support to attend the Annual Meeting in Lisbon.

“Primarily, this grant will help develop an emerging world-wide sociolegal field guided by three principles,” said incoming LSA Secretary Eve Darian-Smith, who served as the Principal Investigator for the NSF grant proposal. “The first is moving scholarship beyond the taken-for-granted framing of the nation-state, both theoretically and methodologically. The second is thinking critically about enduring legacies of colonialism and racism. And the third is taking seriously sociolegal knowledge produced outside the Euro-American academy.”

Click Here to read the full release on lawandsociety.org.

LSA President Laura Beth Nielsen Featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Podcast

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 20:05:32 GMT

AMHERST, Mass. – LSA President Laura Beth Nielsen will be featured in renowned author & journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on Thursday, July 22. The episode will be available and posted to the Pushkin website starting at 5 a.m. ET.

Professor Nielsen joins Gladwell in Episode 1 of a three-part series about Disney’s animated movie, “The Little Mermaid.” The conversation will focus on Professor Nielsen’s 2013 article (co-athored by Nehal A. Patel & Jacob Rosner), “Ahead of the Lawmen: Law and Morality in Disney Animated Films 1960–1998.”

Click Here to read more!

LSA Appoints Dee Smythe to Serve as Inaugural Coordinator of Global Activities

Thu, 1 Apr 2021 20:25:52 GMT

Professor Smythe will be responsible for advising the president and the trustees on all matters relevant to LSA’s global role

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association Board of Trustees and President Penelope Andrews (New York Law School) have appointed Professor Dee Smythe (University of Cape Town) to serve as LSA’s inaugural Coordinator of Global Activities (CGA). The CGA is a newly-created LSA position designed to bolster the association’s commitment to expanding its international collaboration.

“In my opinion Dee’s experience and qualifications for this position are unmatched,” noted President Andrews. “As a member of the board and co-chair of the International Activities Committee (IAC), she knows LSA and its current international engagements.”

Serving a three-year term, Smythe will be responsible for advising the president and the trustees on all matters relevant to LSA’s global role in connecting sociolegal scholars from around the world. She will promote close relations between LSA and other associations, institutions and centers outside the U.S., serving as the LSA representative in the establishment of a standing council of sociolegal associations.

“Law and society is a global field, and LSA is now the largest and most internationalized sociolegal association in the world,” said Smythe. “This new position was established by the board to support LSA’s commitment to our global membership, strengthen our international partnerships and networks, and to grow capacity and opportunities in the field. To be entrusted by the board with the responsibility of giving substance to this position is an enormous privilege.”

Click Here to read the full story on lawandsociety.org.

Law and Society Association Launches New Website!

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:52:52 GMT

LSA has a new look! We are pleased to announce the launch of our brand new website! 

Our new website features a modern and sleek design that offers an intuitive navigational structure. The site will effectively allow us to deliver the latest LSA news and announcements, showcase our members' accomplishments, and better tell LSA's story. 

We would like to invite you to enjoy the site and everything it has to offer with us!

Visit the new: https://www.lawandsociety.org/

LSA Members Collaborate on Initiative to Provide B.A. Degree Opportunities for Incarcerated Students

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:46:29 GMT

Professors Seron, Jenness and Reiter of UCI Bring top-tier education to incarcerated students

AMHERST, Mass. – The University of California-Irvine (UCI) and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) will make history on Tuesday, December 15, when the two institutions meet to sign a MOU, commemorating the first-ever bachelor degree completion program in prison offered by the University of California system. Three Law and Society Association (LSA) members from UCI in Carroll Seron, Val Jenness and Keramet Reiter served on the steering committee for the program called Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees (LIFTED). This innovative initiative enables currently incarcerated students, who have successfully completed an A.A. degree, to earn a B.A. in sociology from UCI.

Tuesday’s ceremonial signing event will take place virtually via Zoom at Noon ET/ 9:00 a.m. PT. Registration for the event is free but is required to attend. UCI Chancellor, Howard Gillman, and California Secretary of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Kathleen Allison will be featured in the event. To register, go here.

“We hope that LIFTED will serve as a model for extending higher education to students who are incarcerated, expanding access to public education, especially, for more students across the state of California and the nation,” said Professor Reiter, who serves as the director for the LIFTED program. “By extending and expanding education access, we hope to mitigate the systemic discrimination and de-humanization of mass incarceration.”

Private liberal arts and community colleges across the country are increasingly offering degree programs for inmates, but few public universities are piloting in-prison bachelor's degree initiatives. The demand for effective in-prison and re-entry programs is pinnacle, given that at least 95% of those incarcerated will return to their communities after serving his or her sentence. Furthermore, the RAND Corporation projects every $1 invested in prison education generates $5 in economic return. UCI is partnering with Southwestern College (SWC) to launch its inaugural demonstration project that extends access to earning bachelor degrees to students enrolled in courses at Ronald J. Donovan Correctional Facility (RJD).

“This program is a point of intervention into two organizational fields that, as we know, draw on stratification and reproduce inequalities: universities and prisons,” added Jenness, a long-time LSA member and Trustee from 2005-08. “This program provides a venue for those who learn behind bars to gain valuable credit and credentials for doing so and to leverage those accomplishments on their behalf as well as the behalf of our communities.”

Seron, Jenness and Reiter hope to bring a world-class education to incarcerated students and advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their home state. They predict LIFTED will be readily replicable at other universities across the state of California. The program is expected to be launched in the fall of 2022. The first cohort will consist of up to 25 students studying sociology. Additional majors on the horizon may include film and media studies, as well as public health.

“In my presidential address to the Law and Society Association, I argued that in a period of extraordinarily deepening inequalities, our research should take seriously our responsibility to develop ‘pragmatic’ policies—those that hold the promise of ameliorating crisis,” noted Seron, who formally served as LSA President from 2013-15. “When I retired from UC-Irvine, my goal was to work directly on a pragmatic policy project. As colleagues were launching the prison education initiative, the project aligned perfectly with my post-retirement plans. It is thrilling to be a part of a project that holds out the promise of making a significant difference in the life chances of incarcerated people.”

The steering committee saw nearly all UCI campus deans pledge faculty time to teach two courses per school as part of the LIFTED program. Faculty from an array of other disciplines have expressed interest in making the trip to prison to teach, offering incarcerated students a complete liberal arts education. The program aims to provide these students with the same quality of education and intellectual opportunities as their counterparts on-campus at UCI, including access to the humanistic writing, drama and visual arts resources.

“One thing we have learned in this work is that networks matter—for identifying comparable programs, best practices, and evaluation protocols, as well as for fundraising—and LSA has been one such important network for us,” added Professor Reiter.

To learn more about the LIFTED program and hear the stories of formerly incarcerated students, view its recently launched website here. The program has received grants from the Michelson Foundation, Google, and individual contributions, but is continuing its fundraising efforts to underwrite program development costs, such as support staff salaries, textbook and supply costs, and faculty transportation to and from the prison. To make a donation, go here.

The LIFTED steering committee also includes Pavan Kadandale, an associate professor of teaching in molecular biology & biochemistry at UCI. Reiter, who recently finished her term as an LSA Trustee, is an associate professor of criminology, law & society. A distinguished professor in criminology, law and society, Jenness serves as UCI’s Acting Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Institutional Research. Seron is a professor emerita of criminology, law & society.

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2020 LSA Election Results Announced

Mon, 9 Nov 2020 21:04:33 GMT

LSA has announced its new President-Elect, Secretary and Class of 2023 Board of Trustees

AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association welcomes its new President Elect, Laura Beth Nielsen, Secretary, Eve Darian-Smith, and the Class of 2023 Board of Trustees, as the association announced the results of its 2020 elections on Tuesday. Every two years, LSA members vote for a new President and Secretary, while trustees are elected annually to serve three-year terms.

“This year’s voting results represent a wide variety of law & society scholars stretching across the globe and consisting of rich and diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds, training and experience,” said current LSA President Penelope Andrews. “Our incoming officers will not only contribute to the sustainability and viability of the LSA, but also demonstrate the importance of advancing the entire field of sociolegal studies through their own personal scholarship and achievements.”

Nielsen highlighted the group, becoming LSA’s 32nd president in 2021 and will start her term following the conclusion of the Annual Meeting. Nielsen currently chairs the Department of Sociology for Northwestern University, where her scholarship focuses on law’s capacity for social change. She studies legal consciousness and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender and class. Nielsen has edited three books and publishes in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, and leading law reviews.

A researcher for the American Bar Foundation, LSA has been Nielsen’s primary intellectual home since 1994, having served as Secretary (2011-13), a Trustee member (2001-04), Program Committee Chair (2004), Co-chair of the Graduate Student Workshop (2010 and 2013), Program Committee (2003) and Jacob Prize Chair (2020 and 2017). She has earned numerous LSA awards, including the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award (2018), Graduate Student Paper Prize (1999), Dissertation Prize (2000) and Article Prize (2002). Nielsen’s work and commentary has made its way into m many ss media outlets. She has received grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.

Darian-Smith extends her active involvement in LSA by becoming the Association’s next Secretary and will start her term in October, 2021. Serving as professor and chair in Global & International Studies for the University of California-Irvine, Darian-Smith has been committed to LSA since joining its community in 1991. She has served on the Board of Trustees three times and Executive Committee twice. Darian-Smith has demonstrated her passion for furthering diversity and encouraging the participation of minority and international scholars. As a member of LSA’s second Half Century Committee, she helped develop support for an African regional meeting.

Over the past three decades, Darian-Smith has consistently served on a host of LSA committees. Recently, she assisted in the submission of a National Science Foundation grant to enable scholars from low and middle-income countries to participate in the LSA 2022 international meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Darian-Smith’s interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on engaging human rights, legal pluralism, (post) colonialism, sociolegal theory and ethnographic methods. She won LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize (2000) and has published widely, including in the Routledge Handbook of Law and Society.

Each year, the LSA membership elects a class of eight individuals to serve on the Board of Trustees. The class of 2023 Trustees will include: Shaun Ossei-Owusu (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School) as the Class Representative, Fabio de Sa e Silva (University of Oklahoma), Rachel Moran (University of California-Irvine School of Law), Linda Mulcahy (University of Oxford), Ayobami Laniyonu (University of Toronto), Jeffrey Omari (Northern Illinois University College of Law), Matthew Shaw (Vanderbilt Law School) and Alison Renteln (University of Southern California).

LSA would like to thank its outgoing officers in Past President Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University), as well as the Class of 2020 Trustees for their hard work and dedication to the association. We also thank all of the candidates who agreed to stand for election and congratulations to all our new officers.

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Two LSA Members Named 2020 MacArthur Fellows

Tue, 6 Oct 2020 21:14:40 GMT

Two LSA members were named 2020 MacArthur Fellows, as announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation this afternoon. Thomas W. Mitchell of Texas A&M University's School of Law and Forrest Stuart of Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences each earned the honor.

From writers and musicians to entrepreneurs and social scientists, the MacArthur Foundation awards talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. Ultimately, this honorable achievement helps progress its fellows’ creativity and research for the benefit of human society.

A Property Law Scholar, Mitchell’s work involves researching rural and urban property loss issues and the legal mechanisms that sustain and facilitate this phenomenon across the country. Mitchell has devoted his life to mitigating these issues, which have disproportionately affected poor and minority communities nationwide. His Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) has been pushed through he floor of the legislature in 17 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The LSA recently wrote a feature story on Mitchell called "Defying Great Odds – Mitigating Property Loss Through Historic Partition Law Reform in the U.S." To read it, click here.

Stuart, a sociologist and urban ethnographer, uses fieldwork, archival, and other qualitative methods to investigate the causes, contours, and consequences of urban poverty. His work has challenged long-held assumptions about the forces that shape urban poverty and violence. Stuart's research brings to light the the lived reality of those who experience this phenomenon. To learn more about his books and research, check out his website here.

The full list of 2020 MacArthur Fellows can be found on their website here. The MacArthur Foundation prepared videos for each of this year's fellows. Both Mitchell's and Stuart's video can be found linked below.

MacArthur Foundation's video about Thomas Mitchell: https://youtu.be/4rpDi1b06xE

MacArthur Foundation's video about Forrest Stuart: https://youtu.be/cVC9sJNUswI