Institution: 

Emory University School of Law

Number of years as LSA member: 

I believe 15, but honestly I am no longer sure!

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

Eight that I can remember offhand – Chicago, Denver, Puerto Rico, Lisbon, DC, Toronto, Mexico City, and New Orleans

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Board of Trustees, Class of 2024

Chair, Budget and Finance Committee | 2022 – 2023

Co-Chair, CRN 08: Labor Rights |roughly 2018 – 2022

Member, International Activities Committee | 2019 – 2021

Other Association Affiliations:

American Anthropological Association

Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Association of American Law Schools

American Society of Comparative Law

Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law (COSELL)

Areas of Research:

Constitutional Ethnography

Gig Work Regulation

Academic Labor

Judicial Reforms

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Research: Toss-up between “Indian Secularism” (a term I took issue with in my first published article!) and Faculty Tenure as a Contractual Protection

Teaching: Also a toss-up, between Law & Policy of India (first generalist survey course of Indian law & judicial system taught in a U.S. law school) and Employment Law

Unique Skill or Fact:

I trained as a bartender as a way to relieve stress from being on the academic job market. I want to get licensed locally to tend bar occasionally, but just as I clear my plate enough to do it, we move. Notwithstanding many years of experimentation, my favorite everyday cocktail remains a *not* bone-dry (gin) martini, and my favorite special occasion cocktail remains a Boulevardier.

Additional Hobbies:

Cooking (lately I’ve been trying to recreate my aunt’s famous homemade Indian pickles) and, less commonly, quilting

Notable Awards and Grants:

Advance Grantee, Law and Society Association | 2025 -2026

Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow, United States Department of State | 2023 – 2024

Religion & Journalism Fellow, Henry Luce Foundation & American Council of Learned Societies | 2020 – 2021

Franklin Research Grantee, American Philosophical Society | 2019 – 2020

International Dissertation Research Fellow, Social Science Research Fellowship | 2010 – 2011

Top Books and/or Publications:

The War on Tenure (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

The Battle for Sabarimala (Oxford University Press, 2024)

“Secularism in the Indian Context” (Law & Social Inquiry, 2013)

Education:

Ph.D., University of Chicago | Anthropology

J.D., University of Chicago

AB, Princeton | Politics

Major Appearances:

Television: 11 Alive, Spectrum TV, KMSP-TV

Podcasts: College Matters, Doing Sociology, Heterodox Academy, I-CONnect, Keen on America, New Books Network, New Legal Realism, Political Philosophy, Tea for Teaching, The Square Circle

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

LSA is where I can be all the things—an anthropologist, a legal scholar, someone who studies work law, constitutional law, religious freedom, higher education—everything. The Association’s “big tent” approach to scholarship is rare and valuable given academia’s natural tendency towards specialization, and it is something that makes me feel simultaneously comforted, excited, and challenged. We are always encountering new ways to learn about law in society, new ways to connect law and society.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

LSA’s warmth and accessibility is unusual and special given academia’s tendency towards closed networks: with LSA, you can join a CRN one year, chair it two years later, contribute to association-wide committees the year after, and become an Associate Editor of its flagship journal and a Trustee of the Association the year after that. I should know—I did. Those opportunities aren’t just valuable because they are prized by hiring or promotions committees: they’re also valuable because they help us learn about the very special—and largely self-operated—world of academia that we have all chosen to live in. I have learned so much from my work with LSA that I simply would not have learned by this stage in my career elsewhere.

Learn more about Deepa Das Acevedo, her many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

Institution: 

The University of Texas at Austin

Number of years as LSA member: 

32

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

About 28

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Board of Trustees, Class of 2028 (previously Class of 2013 and Class of 2006)

Co-Chair, CRN 4: Lay Participation in Legal Systems

Member, Dissertation Prize Committee | 2019

Co-Chair, Professional Development Committee | 2015 – 2017

Member, Ad Hoc Committees on CRNs | 2014, 2010

Member, Program Committee | 2014, 2008, 2005

Co-Organizer, Early Career and Graduate Student Workshop | 2012

Member, Nominations Committee | 2007

Other Association Affiliations:

American Sociological Association

American Psychological Association

Areas of Research:

Juries and Jury Decision Making

Perceptions of Courts and Law

Psychology of Justice

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Use of social science in court/legal system practice

Unique Skill or Fact:

I tend to see myself as part of whatever is “old-school” and fading away: I still go to church (Episcopal) even though mainline religion is disappearing; I study juries even as trials are vanishing; I remain committed to my political party (you can probably guess which one) even as the category of “independent” grows bigger every year. I have not given up on old-guard institutions.

Additional Hobbies:

I like to spend my time having coffee (or a meal) with friends.

Notable Awards and Grants:

Affiliated Scholar Appointment, American Bar Foundation | 2023 – Present

Academic Fellow Appointment, Roscoe Pound Institute | 2021

Outstanding Teacher of the Year, Human Dimensions of Organizations, The University of Texas at Austin | 2022

“Top Ten Professor,” Alcalde, a UT Alumni magazine | 2015

Top Books and/or Publications:

“The Focal Concerns of Jurors’ Evaluating Mitigation: Evidence from Federal Capital Verdict Forms,” Law & Society Review 56(2): 213 – 236 (2022) (with Meredith Martin Rountree).

“Jury Pool Underrepresentation in the Modern Era: Evidence from Federal Courts.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 15: 378 – 405. (2018) (with Raul S. Casarez and Carmen Gutierrez).

Referenced in an episode of “Last Week Tonight” on juries and race (August 16, 2020).

“Judging Bias: Juror Confidence and Judicial Rulings on Challenges for Cause.” Law and Society Review 42: 513 – 549 (2008) (with Shari Seidman Diamond).

Education:

Ph.D., Duke University | Social Psychology

M.A., Duke University | Social Psychology

A.B., Stanford University | Psychology

Major Appearances:

My work has been cited in three U.S. Supreme Court opinions:

Ramos v. Louisiana, 2020

Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 2008

Miller-el v. Dretke, 2005

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

First, LSA has been a welcoming home for my “law and” interests since I was a first-year graduate student. So, it is simply part of my core social identity as an academic. Every year, it seems I meet a new, wonderful person at an LSA meeting, the kind of person I want to listen to and learn from because they are so smart; but also, they are the kind of people you want to be friends with. LSA members are my “people.”

Second, since LSA initiated Collaborative Research Networks, CRN 04 (Lay Participation in Legal Decision Making) has been a key part of my work, my thinking, and my ability to connect regularly with other, interdisciplinary scholars of the jury.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

There is no other organization that so comprehensively studies law and legal systems empirically. Other groups are either disciplinary-specific (e.g., psychology and law, economics and law, etc.), or focus their attention on a more narrow set of methodological tools (e.g., largely quantitative approaches). LSA brings together all disciplines, all methods, and finds ways to put law professors and law researchers in conversation with each other. There is, in short, something of everything to be found in LSA.

For students in particular, LSA is a fantastic way to learn how to present research. It has a fairly low bar to entry in terms of getting onto the program, and students in my department have told me how kind people are to them at meetings. There are also mentoring and workshop opportunities students can and should take advantage of.

Learn more about Mary Rose, her many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

The first, “Territorio como espacio relacional y base de todas las vidas. Conocimiento Mapuche en un context intercultural,” was given by Dra. Elisa Loncón Antileo, a Mapuche linguist and the inaugural President of Chile’s Constitutional Convention. The second, “The difference that critical legal geography makes: precarity, property, and power,” was given by Dr. Nicholas Blomley, professor of geography at Simon Fraser University and a foundational figure in critical legal geography.

The conference is the first of two Critical Legal Geography programs receiving funding from the 2026 LSA Advance Grant Program. The second, the 2027 Summer School on Indigenous Legal Geographies, will convene 15 to 20 academics, early-career researchers, and graduate students for intensive training and support in the study of Indigenous legal traditions, geographies, environmental relations, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and posthumanism.

Institution: 

University of California, Irvine School of Law

Number of years as LSA member: 

10+

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

6

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Board of Trustees, Class of 2026

Other Association Affiliations:

Association of Law & Political Economy

American Association of University Professors

Areas of Research:

Social movements and law

Technology, society, and law

Work, law, and society

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Technology, labor, and law

Unique Skill or Fact:

I’m the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors. We sued the federal government nine times in 2025. I am most proud that in AAUP v. Rubio, we got a declaratory judgement that the ideological deportation policy is unconstitutional, thus protecting the academic freedom and safety of noncitizen scholars. And in AAUP v. Trump, we got a preliminary injunction, successfully preventing the Trump administration from unlawfully using civil rights laws and funding cuts as a cudgel to reshape the University of California system in the President’s ideological image.

Additional Hobbies:

I spend most of my time teaching, researching, and organizing with gig workers and faculty (in many cases, faculty ARE gig workers), as well as parenting my three young children. Sometimes I get to read for fun! And I enjoy translating my academic research into public writing.

Notable Awards and Grants:

Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award for Hindi/Urdu | 2007 – 2008

Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law (COSELL) Michael Zimmer Memorial Award | 2019

Minority Bar Association Unity Award | 2009

South Asian Bar Association of Northern California (SABA-NC) Public Interest Attorney of the Year Award | 2009

Top Books and/or Publications:

“Algorithmic Wage Discrimination.” Columbia Law Review 123(7): 1929-1992

“Data Laws at Work.” Yale Law Journal Forum 134: 405-447

“Wage Slave or Entrepreneur?: Contesting the Dualism of Legal Worker Identities.” California Law Review 105(1): 65-123

Education:

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley | Jurisprudence & Social Policy

J.D., University of California, Berkeley School of Law

B.A., Stanford University

Major Appearances:

Keynote Address, Countervailing Platform Power. Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy. June 2025

Keynote Address, Work Futures Observatory Conference, Nottingham Trent University, June 2025

Keynote Address, Canadian Work & Labor Studies Association Conference, May 2025

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

I learn a tremendous amount from other LSA members and from the LSA annual conference. Being among scholars who work interdisciplinarily exposes me to a wide variety of literatures and ideas. It is my intellectual home.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

I have been an LSA member since my graduate school days, and it remains my academic home. LSA was the first professional organization I joined, and LSA was the first academic conference that I attended. Professionals should join because it is an association that will help them put their work into a larger analytical context. Students should join because they will get incredible feedback on their work, access to the best peer reviewed articles, and mentors that will support them throughout their careers.

Learn more about Veena Dubal, her many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

“We’re living in a world where you can’t just assume, in the classic law and society tradition, that there are exogenous forces that impinge upon the practice of law and that make things happen in certain ways, and ‘maybe we can fix it!’” explains Bill Maurer, the Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the Law and Society Review’s new General Editors. “There has always been this ameliorative gesture in a lot of law and society scholarship to ‘fix the law.’ But we’re in a world now where we don’t even know what law is, or what it’s becoming. We don’t know about its ideological or material durability going forward.”

“That’s really one of the big questions for us right now…as scholars and people in the world,” he continues. “What does the law and society movement need to become to match the moment that we’re in?”

This is a heavy, overwhelming question—but you wouldn’t know it from the overall tone of the conversation I had with them in February, which was characterized by the type of teasing joviality that only appears among good friends. Professor Maurer and his two new co-editors, Justin Richland and Lee Cabatingan, have a long, dynamic history. Professor Cabatingan met Professor Maurer as a prospective graduate student at UC Irvine, where he was poised to be her advisor. When she pivoted and decided to attend the University of Chicago instead, Professor Richland served on her doctoral committee. The three eventually reunited at UC Irvine, where Professor Richland serves as the Chair of the Anthropology Department and Professor Cabatingan teaches criminology, law and society, and anthropology.

“We have known each other for a long time,” says Professor Maurer, “each of us as pairs and as the three of us in different kinds of contexts, in different roles, in different relationships, including power relationships…We have a very high degree of trust in one another as people, but also trust in each other’s work and trust in each other’s judgement as scholars.”

It is little wonder, then, that, when applying for the LSR General Editor position, Professor Richland asked Professors Maurer and Cabatingan to join him.

“I think I went to each one of them and said, ‘Would you do this with me, PLEASE?’” he recalls. “I think I begged.”

“It was begging,” Professor Maurer confirmed.

“What I really appreciate about working with these two is that none of us thinks that we know everything,” chimes in Professor Cabatingan. “It makes it a very open space for me to be able to speak out and pretend I know something, because we understand that we all have learning to do, especially when it comes to this role.”

In some ways, Professor Cabatingan has the most to learn about the position, which constitutes her first experience with editorial leadership. Professors Richland and Maurer are more seasoned in this regard.

“I’ve definitely got the seasoning,” Professor Maurer says.

“The grey beard, does this suggest seasoning?” Professor Richland asks. “It should.”

Professor Richland is a former Books Review Editor for the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, as well as a former co-Editor-in-Chief of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) with one of his mentors, John M. Conley. He is currently on the editorial board of a book series, The Anthropology of Language, through Oxford University Press. Professor Maurer also was a co-Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR alongside former LSA President, the late Sally Engle Merry. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy, an interdisciplinary journal featuring everyone from sociologists to communications scholars, as well as an editorial board member for a book series through Princeton University Press, Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology.

“I thought it was kind of cute when you guys were talking about how Bill worked with Sally Merry, Justin worked with John Conley, and I’m like, ‘You two are my Sally Merry and John Conley!’” says Professor Cabatingan. “Fifteen years from now I’m going to be like, ‘I worked with the most respected law and society scholars, they took me under their wing.’ That’s who I’ll get to say I worked with.”

Perhaps another reason for the relaxed tone of the conversation was that, as anthropologists, the three professors are used to, in the words of Professor Maurer, “approaching empirical settings as other worlds.” As one of the founding disciplines of law and society, anthropology’s theories, perspectives, and commitments are threaded all throughout sociolegal scholarship. In recent decades, however, anthropology has found itself increasingly peripheral to the field, with journals like the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) and PoLAR hosting increasingly specialized conversations about colonial legacies, epistemological authority, and the ability to produce knowledge.

These conversations are important, but Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan are intent on fostering broader, cross-disciplinary discourse.

“We’ve always been invested in the conversations taking place in the law and society space, and we are hoping to enrich and deepen and broaden them,” Professor Maurer explains, going on to affirm their commitment to more “traditional” law and society work.

“We certainly will have a home for that scholarship, but also hope to push in directions…that speak to the world we’re living in right now,” Professor Maurer explains. “Through working with other colleagues in sociology, history, law, whatever other field people are coming to the journal from, we can enrich the conversation about this world that we are inhabiting and where it might go, which may also shift again what the law and society movement is all about.”

In order to push law and society into the future, Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan are prepared to navigate the field’s flagship journal into unchartered waters.

“How is it [law] presenting itself in the world, and what are the novel ways in which it is doing so—law as a phenomenon, law as a set of relations, as a force—how are the ways in which we’ve taken that for granted in the past coming up for reconsideration right now in ways that are, frankly, unnerving?” says Professor Richland. “The fact that we have to ask these questions in the first place means this is a prime moment for LSR to expand its reach and open up the conversation.”

Armed with tools and advice from the previous General Editors, Ashley Rubin, Katharina Heyer, and their colleague at UC Irvine, Shauhin Talesh, as well as their Managing Editor, Ryan Cadrette; their Editorial Assistant, Isabel Patten; and their new Associate Editors, Kirsten Carlson, Kate Henne, Michael Ralph, and Sara Wakefield, the team is exploring strategies for doing just that: “opening up the tent” without alienating current readers. By revamping LSR’s social media presence and building out its digital platform with short form essays, commentary, and interviews, they hope to drive more readership to the journal.

“It goes along with actually rethinking what a journal is and what a journal is for,” Professor Maurer says. “Kate pointed out to us…’You have to remember that people don’t read journal articles anymore, or even abstracts. They read quick AI summaries of journal articles.’”

LSR’s newest Book Review Editors, Melissa Crouch (University of New South Wales) and Amy Cohen (Temple University), are asking themselves a similar question: What role can and should book reviews play in the field of law and society moving forward?

“It’s becoming more important to be able to say something substantive about a book in your own voice, with your own stamp, rather than a book review being primarily a summary of the book itself,” Professor Crouch explains, alluding to the fact that large language models are now able to produce thematic book summaries.

To that end, Professors Cohen and Crouch, who succeed former Book Review Editors Jothie Rajah, Eve Lester, and Anna Reosti, are working to integrate longer form essays into LSR’s book review section. The newer format will allow writers to demonstrate their grasp of the field, generate their own ideas in conversation with the works they are covering, and describe their reading experiences.

“We need to feature how a book lands for a reader,” Professor Cohen says. “What does it feel like to read? What connections are you having? How do you link this to a field? The things that a human reader really does with a book is what I hope we can showcase with a longer form essay.”

“I think when great books come out, reviewers are good at saying, ‘This is the kind of research this book could lead to, this is the next thing that could follow on from this book, this is what the field should be doing as a result of this book,” Professor Crouch continues. “That’s one of the things that great books do, they contribute new directions and innovations to the field that lead to other kinds of scholarship.”

In order to demystify the process of book reviews, Professors Crouch and Cohen have published updated guidelines and advice for book authors, publishers and potential reviewers here.

The General Editors and Book Review Editors are also tweaking the review process to ensure that scholars from a wide range of fields and regions are well-represented. Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan have assembled a team of associate editors from the worlds of political science, history, criminology, sociology, legal doctrine, and regulatory studies. Each associate editor fields articles in their respective areas of expertise, either recommending them for rejection or soliciting peer reviewers for pieces they think should move forward.

“You’re getting lots of levels of review guaranteed at the very outset,” Professor Richland says. “You’re getting lots of eyes, lots of different perspectives. Not just our three, or our six [bespectacled] eyes, but people who are well-versed in the area that is represented.”

Professors Crouch and Cohen are making an intentional effort to ensure that the book review section accurately reflects law and society’s diversity. They are still accepting direct pitches from publishers, authors, and prospective reviewers, but they are also proactively looking for books from authors based in the Global South and other less-represented regions.

“Amy obviously has…connections in the US, but also globally, and she has done work in India. I’ve been mostly based in Australia, but also in other parts of the world, particularly Asia,” Professor Crouch explains. “We hope to bring together those combined and overlapping networks to feature really interesting books that are coming out.”

LSR’s new editors have a lot on their plate, but their biggest challenge, surprisingly enough, is logistical: finding peer reviewers.

With another journal he is involved in, Professor Maurer says, “I literally will just ask three people, and all three will do it, or I’ll ask three and two will do it.” But with LSR, “… in some instances we’re asking ten, and getting one, and then going back and trying to come up with other people to ask.”

This is a major issue, and a tricky one. Peer review, which Professor Richland calls “the lifeblood of academic publishing,” functions on a sort of gift economy basis. While academic publishers make money distributing peer-reviewed articles, scholars themselves perform this critical labor anonymously and for free, with no real incentives other than passion for the work. Like mentorship and letter-writing, peer review doesn’t factor into merit consideration for individual career trajectories, and as economic stability becomes increasingly elusive and the academic job market somehow manages to become even more competitive, scholars are forced to adopt a pragmatic mindset when assessing their priorities.

“Most academics wear multiple hats,” Professor Richland explains. “I think people are feeling stretched in ways that they haven’t felt before.”

“For many people too, especially academics just starting their career, they will have a very practical question: ‘Okay, you’re telling me for tenure I have to publish peer reviewed journal articles, I have to get my book out or whatever, I’m expected to contribute professional service, and that includes things like peer reviewing. But tell me: how many does that mean? Does that mean one a year? Two a year?’” Professor Maurer says. “Whereas for me, even now with serving as co-Editor in Chief of the journal, if I get a request from another journal to do a review and the manuscript looks interesting and good, I say yes. I want to know what’s going on in the field, I want to read some exciting stuff. I imagine that maybe I can be useful—part of the whole aspect in which this is a vocation, not a job. But for many people, more and more people, it is also a job.”

“It’s a throwback to a different time and different understanding of what it means to be in a profession that I think is still laudable, but increasingly difficult to accomplish,” says Professor Richland.

To the three professors’ relief and appreciation, LSR’s Editorial Board members have committed to reviewing two to three manuscripts per person for the journal. An email has also gone out to LSA members, asking them to register with ScholarOne, the journal’s submission management system, for potential peer review assignments.

“It’s a little bit of a plea to the membership,” says Professor Maurer. “Please please please, the journal is only going to live to the extent to which we can have a rigorous process of peer review, and we can’t get it without our membership and our readership.”

Professors Crouch and Cohen have a similar request.

“Authors want their books reviewed, but it can be hard sometimes to get people to review books. So we want to encourage members to see this as part of their service to the field. We particularly encourage those in an emeritus role to impart their perspective on the field through a book review. Alternatively, early career scholars who are keen to start engaging with the field should think about proposing a book review to us,” says Professor Crouch.

LSR has been a pillar of the sociolegal studies world for decades now. To celebrate the journal’s 60^th anniversary this year, the editors plan to share online content highlighting the most read, downloaded, and cited articles in LSR history, with corresponding interviews. They are also hosting a panel at the 2026 Annual Meeting, where they will introduce the new Associate Editors, share updates about the submission and review process, and share their vision for the journal’s future as a home for innovative thought.

“When I have students, I want to get to that point where I can see their faces melting off at what I’m telling them, because I’ve made them think differently about the world,” says Professor Richland. “I hope we can capture that vibe for the journal.”

Professor Maurer agrees. “I think the thing that’s hard is translating that into the pages of the journal. You get the submissions you get, you do the editorial work you can do. But hopefully, even just by reading this interview, people will feel a little bit of freedom for this kind of exploration, and we will get submissions that reflect that.”

Some scholars will be hesitant to submit anything but their most finished, polished work to a journal with LSR’s stature and reputation. The editors, though, are confident that they can help submitters present fresh ideas in a way that maintains the journal’s high standard of quality.

“There is one outside-the-box article that Bill put some notes on, saying, ‘Take a look at this one, it’s interesting,’” says Professor Cabatingan. “And I looked at it and said, ‘This is fascinating! What do we do with it now?’”

“We want to encourage people to send those types of articles, because we will help you get them across the finish line, if they really do ignite interest and explore some new topic from a law and society perspective. Those are really interesting articles for us to read and discuss, and for other people hopefully to read as well.”

“I really would love that spark of wondering,” Professor Richland says. “Because we are living in a moment where we should be wondering.”

The event featured four panel discussions based on Graber’s book, which unveils new insights about Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment, and constitutionalism. Panelists came from institutions all over the country, including Yale Law School, University of Toledo College of Law, University of Richmond School of Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law, University of Tennessee Winston College of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law, and University of Wisconsin School of Law.

The full program is available for viewing on Youtube.

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 9: Law and Health. 

When University of Utah Professor Leslie Francis first encountered the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network 9: Law and Health, she was immediately hooked.

“Law and Society has been ‘where I found my people’ in the legal academy,” she explains.

Her “people,” the members of CRN 9, are legal scholars in health law, public health, health care, human rights and health, medical sociology, medical anthropology, disability studies, health politics, and related fields. They come from all over the world—most notably the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and South and Central America—and bring with them a variety of different research approaches, from empirical and theoretical to comparative and even aesthetic. These days, Professor Francis co-chairs CRN 9 alongside Dorit Reiss (UC Law San Francisco) and Allison Whelan (Georgia State University). Professor Reiss studies vaccines in relation to torts, administrative law, and public health, while Allison Whelan studies topics related to reproductive justice, bioethics, the FDA, administrative law, and constitutional law.

“It’s a big tent!” she acknowledges—and that’s exactly the point. Throughout her career, Professor Francis has learned firsthand how intellectually diverse environments can add depth and breadth to one’s research. As a graduate student, she attended the University of Michigan, one of the few institutions with a joint program for studying law and philosophy, and she now holds appointments in both fields. One of her most frequent collaborators, University of Utah political scientist John Francis, is also her husband. But Professor Francis’ circumstances remain somewhat unique; while crossover programming adjacent to the legal academy has grown over the years, law schools, for the most part, have not yet embraced the practice. What’s more, law faculty often contend with various forms of isolation—physical isolation, with many law departments dwelling on far-flung corners of campus, or different campuses altogether, and intellectual isolation fostered by law schools’ intense focus on US News and World Report accreditation and the production of legal practitioners rather than advancing legal scholarship.

“If you do health law, you’re going to work for a health care company,” says Professor Francis, illustrating the academy’s thought-process.

CRN 9’s seemingly unwieldy scope is manageable due to the group’s shared focus on social change, which grounds them and provides the basis for fruitful intellectual collaboration and connection. Sometimes, this exchange occurs in formal settings like the LSA Annual Meeting, where recent panels on abortion, reproductive rights, and other controversial forms of healthcare have attracted diverse academic audiences. Other times, informal conversation at CRN 9’s dinner and cocktail parties, over the CRN listserv, or through personal correspondence with friends made through the network leave indirect impacts that inevitably inform the members’ scholarly work.

For Professor Francis and many other CRN 9 members, getting to the root cause—and exploring the impact—of social issues, such as limited reproductive health access for women, is essential to the struggle for social justice. Their findings, after all, can inform decision-making by advocates, policy makers, and the general public. Professor Whelan’s recent article on the destabilizing impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on clinical research, for instance, provides important information for people invested in safe medical care for pregnant persons and fetuses, especially those who already face health disparities, as well as potential approaches to combatting these effects. Professor Reiss’ work on vaccine law, which she has recently spoken about with outlets such as The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR, provides an important counter-narrative to nonscientific information from the United States federal government. Through her research and interactions with the public, she has been able to sound the alarm about the deadly implications of vaccine policy changes under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, such as public health layoffs, cuts to research funding, and the proliferation of misinformation that influences private decision-making. Critically, she has also used her voice to suggest possible ways to mitigate negative impacts in the immediate future, encouraging state governments to supplement funding and policy gaps within their jurisdictions and medical associations to continue publishing data and scientifically sound guidance.

CRN 9 offers more than just intellectual expansion and a space for social inquiry, however. Recent political upheavals in the United States and around the world have presented existential challenges for social scientists, whose work is often suppressed and/or ignored in favor of political decisions that somehow make things even worse for vulnerable communities.

CRN 9’s scholarly community ensures that members don’t have to face these challenges alone. This is especially important for junior scholars, who face the disadvantage of entering the field under the most volatile conditions in recent memory. Through their involvement in CRN 9, and LSA more broadly, young academics are able to stave off the effects of structural, cultural, and intellectual isolation by developing interdisciplinary relationships early in their careers.

“I’m personally not isolated because I’m in two departments, and because I have a life partner in a third, but my law life is isolated,” Professor Francis says. “And Law and Society is a way, in the more general academic space, to address that.”

“I think the CRN has been a source of people feeling supported by one another in the work they do.”

Institution: 

Southwestern Law School

Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE)

Number of years as LSA member: 

16

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

14

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Board of Trustees, Class of 2028

Diversity Committee

Other Association Affiliations:

Association of American Law Schools

American Law Institute

Areas of Research:

Legal Education

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Belonging

Mixed Methods and Empirical Research

Intersectionality

Racial Representation

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Wellness in Legal Education and the Legal Profession

Unique Skill or Fact:

I graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, home of scholars and champions!

Additional Hobbies:

Reading

Puzzles

Traveling

Swimming

Notable Awards and Grants:

National Jurist, Top 20 Most Influential People in Legal Education | 2026

AALS Judith Welch Wegner Award | 2025

Kenneth & Harle Montgomery Foundation Scholars Award | 2023 – 2024

CAPALF Eric K. Yamamoto Emerging Scholar Award | 2018

Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellowship | 2005

National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship

Top Books and/or Publications:

Meera E. Deo, Unequal Profession: Race & Gender in Legal Academia, Stanford University Press (2019).

Meera E. Deo, Pandemic Pressures on Faculty, 170 Pa. L. Rev. Online 127 (2022).

Meera E. Deo, Jacquelyn Petzold, and Chad Christensen, Twenty Years of LSSSE: Sharing Trends in Legal Education, LSSSE 2024 Annual Report (2024).

Education:

B.A., University of California, Berkeley | Interdisciplinary Studies

J.D., University of Michigan Law School

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles | Sociology

Major Appearances:

American University Washington College of Law, National People of Color Conference, Improving Diversity & Inclusion in our Unequal Profession, DC, Mar 2019.

AALS Annual Meeting Author-Meets-Reader, Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia, DC, Jan 2020.

Indiana University, The COVID Care Crisis in Academia, Jan 2021.

Boston University Law Review Symposium (keynote), Women in Legal Academia, Boston, Feb 2026.

LSA Annual Meeting, Resisting Overcompliance, San Francisco, May 2026.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

What I find most beneficial about being an LSA member is the strong sense of community we have cultivated. I think of LSA as an institutional home. It’s the perfect place to connect various aspects of my interdisciplinary background in law, education, and sociology. There’s space for theory, empirical research, even work grounded in advocacy and activism. Plus, the personal connections and friendships I’ve built with other members makes it feel like home.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

Everyone should join LSA because it is for everyone! No matter what your field of study, the law and broader society impact you and your work. I especially encourage colleagues to attend LSA meetings—it’s the best place to take a deep dive into your professional passions and get exposure to research you may not otherwise learn about. Plus, LSSSE throws a fun party every year during LSA! And LSA meetings are always in fabulous locations—Lisbon, Honolulu, Denver, Toronto, Mexico City, San Francisco, and more.

Learn more about Meera E. Deo, her many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

Institution: 

Stanford University

Number of years as LSA member: 

10+

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

10+

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Board of Trustees, Class of 2026

Other Association Affiliations:

American Sociological Association

Population Association of America

Areas of Research:

Surveillance

International Migration

Immigration Enforcement

Health

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Race and Immigration

Unique Skill or Fact:

I’m an armchair commentator of professional tennis. I may or may not have a social media presence devoted to match analysis and hot takes. The evidence is inconclusive.

Additional Hobbies:

Pets

Reading

Television

Travel

Notable Awards and Grants:

Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, Eastern Sociological Society | 2025

Distinguished Book Award, Pacific Sociological Association | 2025

Best Book in Current Events (Gold Medal), Independent Publishers Book Awards | 2025

Best Publication Award, Mental Health Section, American Sociological Association | 2025

IPUMS Health Surveys Best Published Research Award | 2025

C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems | 2024

Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Law Section, American Sociological Association | 2024

Robert J. Bursik Junior Scholar Award, Communities and Place Division, American Society of Criminology | 2024

Louis Wirth Best Article Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association | 2019

Top Books and/or Publications:

Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

“Spatial and Temporal Contexts of Formal Social Control and System Involvement: U.S. Latinos under Immigration Policing.” Law & Society Review 59(1): 172-208 (with Livia Baer-Bositis).

“Deportation Threat Predicts Latino U.S. Citizens and Noncitizens’ Psychological Distress, 2011-2018.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(9): e2306554121 (with Amy L. Johnson, Christopher Levesque, and Neil A. Lewis, Jr.).

Education:

PhD, Harvard University | Sociology

AM, Harvard University | Sociology

BA, University of Wisconsin-Madison | Political Science and Spanish

Major Appearances:

“The Many Ways We Monitor Undocumented Immigrants,” KERA Think with Krys Boyd, September 2023

“Susana Matta Valdivieso on the Parkland Shooting, Abuse, and Anti-Immigrant Laws in Florida,” Teen Vogue, September 2023

“How Latino Undocumented Families Deal with the Threat of Deportation,” The Source (Texas Public Radio), May 2023

“Watching the Watchers: The Surveillance of Immigrants with Asad L. Asad,” The Rational Middle, April 2022

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

I didn’t fully realize I was a sociolegal scholar until I attended my first Law and Society Association annual meeting. LSA clarified my intellectual identity, introduced me to an interdisciplinary community of scholars, and fostered friendships I might not otherwise have formed. While the timing of the annual meeting varies, it often falls in or around my birthday in early June. Suffice it to say, LSA is the only annual meeting I’m genuinely happy to attend on my birthday.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

LSA allows professionals and students alike to traverse disciplinary boundaries in ways that generate bigger ideas, sharper analytical tools, and more direct public impact. Much of the world we inhabit—and study—sits at the intersection of law and society. While disciplinary tools remain important, LSA offers a rare space for sustained intellectual cross-pollination. Through its annual meetings in thoughtfully selected cities around the world, as well as ongoing opportunities for professional development and engagement with scholars across career stages, LSA creates a community where people think together across difference. As careers advance and professional demands intensify, such spaces become increasingly rare. LSA ensures that, at least once a year, you can think in community with others who approach your questions from distinct intellectual and professional perspectives—and, in doing so, collectively improve your work and perhaps even a small corner of the world.

Learn more about Asad L. Asad, his many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

Institution: 

Cornell University

Number of years as LSA member: 

6

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

6

Other Association Affiliations:

American Sociological Association

Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Latin American Studies Association

Areas of Research:

Structural and Racial Inequality

Immigration

Refugee and Asylum Law

Civil and Human Rights

Mass Incarceration and Rehabilitation

Monetary Sanctions

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Immigration

Unique Skill or Fact:

When I am not focused on my research, I spend my time dabbling in the culinary arts. I have always said if I were not an academic, I would be a chef!

Additional Hobbies:

Painting

Reading

Notable Awards and Grants:

Brooks Dissertation Fellowship, Cornell University | 2026-2027

Graduate Student Fellow, Law and Society Association | 2025-2027

Graduate Student Research Grant Award, Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, Cornell University | 2025-2026

Migrations Graduate Fellow, Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University | 2025-2026

W.E.B. DuBois Scholar Mentee, National Institute of Justice | 2022-2025

Sociological Perspectives Service Commendation, Pacific Sociological Association | 2021

Top Books and/or Publications:

“Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Public Assistance, Monetary Sanctions, and Financial Double-Dealing in America,” (RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2022). With Bryan L. Sykes, Meghan Ballard, Andrea Giuffre, Rebecca Goodsell, Daniela Kaiser, and Justin Sola.

“Barred: Labor Market Dynamics and Human Capital Development Among People on Probation and Parole.” (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2022). With Bryan L. Sykes, Meghan Ballard, Daniela Kaiser, J. Amanda Sharry, and Justin Sola.

Education:

Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University | Public Policy (in progress)

M.A., University of California, Irvine | Social Ecology

M.A., University of California, Merced | Sociology

B.A., California State University, Fullerton | Sociology and Chicana/o Studies

A.A., Fullerton College | Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies: Social Science

Major Appearances:

“Assailing Asylum: The Political Manufacturing of an Asylum Crisis in the United States, 1980-2023.” Presented jointly with Bryan L. Sykes. Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. May 2025

“Assailing Asylum: Affirmative and Defensive Asylum Grant Rates in the United States, 1980-2023.” Virtual Presentation, Migration Lab at Cornell University. 2025.

“Best Practices for Methodological Approaches for Immigration Research.” Virtual Presentation, Graduate Research Methods Seminar at San Jose State University. 2024.

“Appearing Indigent: Judicial Decision-making and the Assessment of Poverty in the Imposition of Monetary Sanctions.” Presented jointly with Bryan L. Sykes, Meghan Ballard, Daniela Kaiser, J. Amanda Sharry, and Justin Sola. Global Meeting on Law and Society. July 2022.

“Robbing Peter to Pay Paul? Financial Double-Dealings, Public Assistance, and the Repayment of Criminal Justice Debt.” Presented jointly with Bryan L. Sykes, Meghan Ballard, Andrea Giuffre, Rebecca Goodsell, Daniela Kaiser, and Justin Sola. Virtual Presentation for the Russell Sage Foundation. February 2021.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

Being an LSA member has provided valuable opportunities to connect and collaborate with scholars from various disciplines and policy analysts across the globe researching relevant and timely issues, particularly those related to migration and public policy. Additionally, as a formerly incarcerated youth, a first-generation college student, and a scholar of color, I bring a distinct perspective on the challenges of navigating structural, institutional, and racial inequalities in the U.S. Thus, I appreciate that the LSA explicitly values diversity, equity, inclusion, and, most importantly, justice, ensuring that all members’ voices are heard and valued within the intellectual community. Lastly, I value the LSA’s strong commitment to mentoring and supporting graduate students and junior faculty. As an LSA member, I have benefited from various mentoring opportunities that have fostered a supportive and positive environment for my personal and professional growth.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

For professionals and students, becoming a member of LSA is a great way to build a strong network of like-minded scholars committed to rigorous social science research and advocating for social justice and equity.

Learn more about Vicente C. Mata, Jr., his many publications, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 6: Sex, Work, Law and Society. 

Every year, scholars from around the globe descend upon a new city to talk about ideas and learn something new. Notebooks and tablets in hand, they mingle over coffee and tea before taking their seats and absorbing new information that promises to expand their perspectives and enhance their research agendas.

Their lecturers are unconventional and diverse—senior home residents in Mexico, migrant organizers in Canada, Black and trans activists in the United States. They all share one thing in common, however: they are all sex workers. Despite the inherent risk, these individuals welcome researchers into their carefully constructed safe spaces to share the truth of their lives—good, bad, and ugly.

University of North Carolina Wilmington Assistant Professor Menaka Raguparan does not take this for granted. For over a decade, she has been entrusted with the stories of sex workers craving, like everybody else, to be seen and understood.

“‘We’ll tell you the happy and sappy story. You use your smarts to retell our stories to the rest of the world the right way,’” she says, referencing the mandate she has received from the community over the years. “I always call it a blessing and a privilege to be so trusted.”

“I’ve always stayed intact with the community, right from my undergraduate days…I’m making sure I’m not speaking on behalf of them, but that I am just a platform where they can use me…because I have access to all these venues.”

One of these venues is the LSA Annual Meeting, where she and the Collaborative Research Network she started, CRN 6: Sex, Work, Law, and Society, hold multiple panels for scholars of sex work and related fields each year. Their programming is anything but salacious or sensationalistic; after all, CRN 6 members see sex work as, well, work. Examining the intersection between the two, they explore how sexuality is regulated in the workplace and how working conditions differ for those in the sex industry vs. the mainstream workforce. Some members are sex workers themselves; most refer to themselves as “critical sex work scholars,” arguing against the conflation of “sex work” and “sexual exploitation.”

“Sex workers…have a greater level of autonomy and understanding. They know what their work is. They are also savvy in getting away from troubling situations,” Dr. Raguparan explains. “It’s the vulnerable people who get caught into trafficking and get exploited. By targeting sex workers who are savvy, we’re missing the vulnerable population that really needs state assistance.”

Sex work research hasn’t always held a prominent spot in LSA programming, mind you. In 2016, Dr. Raguparan, then a passionate graduate student, complained so vocally and persistently about the peripheral treatment of her subject, often folded into broader panels on feminism and labor, that she evoked exasperated murmurs from other attendees, with one saying, “If you don’t like it, change it.” So, she did.

“I went back home and immediately started writing a proposal,” she says. With support from fellow sex work researchers, mentors, and friends, she submitted an application to form CRN 6 that same summer—then braced herself for seemingly inevitable pushback.

“We thought [LSA] would come up with suggestions of, like, collaborating with Feminist Legal Theory, or some other compromise,” Dr. Raguparan recalled.

But the pushback never came. Instead, CRN 6 made its LSA debut at the 2017 Annual Meeting in Mexico City, with seven panels, 60 members, and the seeds of a fruitful culture of collaboration with sex work communities. Nearly a decade later, CRN 6 has consistently proven its subject’s “main character” status. Now boasting a membership of more than 200 scholars, CRN 6 regularly collaborates with groups such as CRN 22: South Asia and CRN 8: Labor Rights, holds yearly business meetings and panels, runs a popular monthly newsletter featuring a highly-coveted publication list, and, most importantly, creates opportunities for sex workers to speak for themselves, on their own terms, to a larger audience.

The most prominent of these opportunities is CRN 6’s flagship yearly event, the “Day of Dialogue (DoD).” Held in conjunction with the LSA Annual Meeting, the event unites CRN members with local sex work organizations, who then educate the scholars on their community’s needs and experiences, while advising them, especially non-sex workers, on best practices for effectively and ethically studying their population.

“We usually liaise with the community months in advance, and we always give free reign to them entirely. ‘You drive the conversation, you drive everything. We are here to really give you the audience,’” Dr. Raguparan explains.

Organizations have taken full advantage of this freedom, holding panel sessions, sharing videos, and even creating roleplay exercises.

“Sex workers have run simulations where…academics play the role of a sex worker and you’re coming to a bank asking for a loan,” Dr. Raguparan says, “and then sex workers are the bank managers who deny the loan and provide justifications for rejecting the loan application.”

Attendees, no matter how long they have been in the field, always come away with surprising information, or even just information that they hadn’t considered. The “world’s oldest profession” has always been uniquely vulnerable to the events and social changes of a given era. Overturned abortion laws in the United States, for instance, have introduced significant complications for sex workers in impacted regions. The Covid-19 pandemic sidelined people in the sex industry, too, but without the benefit of financial assistance or designation as “essential workers.”

Dr. Raguparan, for her part, never ceases to be shocked by the generosity and hospitality of sex work communities she has worked with. At the first (then unnamed) Day of Dialogue event in Mexico City, Dr. Raguparan and CRN 6 were warmly received by Casa Xochiquetzal, a home for senior sex workers, former and current.

“Some of the sex workers were in their seventies and eighties…former and current sex workers who serviced their ‘regular’ clientele…there were a few male sex workers too. The cutest place under the sun…they were living together as a community. Because of the stigma of sex work…their children have disowned them,” Dr. Raguparan explains. “They took a group of CRN 6 members on a tour of their house, and we got to hang out with them. A couple of the residents of Casa Xochiquetzal joined us for dinner, and they showed me how to drink beer the proper way.”

Dr. Raguparan was sheepish to “only” have a $3,000 donation to offer, despite her assertive efforts to get colleagues to donate more. But, with the local exchange rate, Xochiquetzal had 14,000-15,000 pesos to replace their recently-broken, lone washing machine with two new ones—a godsend in a shared home full of working seniors.

Since Mexico City, CRN 6 has only skipped Day of Dialogue once—in Puerto Rico, where language barriers and local safety issues prevented Dr. Raguparan from connecting with groups in the area. In Toronto, they met with Butterfly and the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN), two organizations serving migrant sex workers. In Washington, DC, they met with Honoring Individual Power and Strength (HIPS), an organization for Black, trans sex workers. In Denver, they worked with an interconnected web of groups providing emergency funding, sex positive holistic healing, and/or additional direct services for sex workers: Rocky Mountain Sex Worker Coalition, Black Sex Workers of Colorado, Chrysalis House LCA, and the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and Fund. In Lisbon, they met with the European Sex Worker Alliance (ESWA) in collaboration with the Portugal Activist Group on Treatments (GAT), Agencia Piaget para o Desenvolvimento (APDES), and Movimento dxs Trabalhadorxs do Sexo (MTS). Most recently, they met with Equality Illinois and Taskforce Prevention and Community Services in Chicago. Each year, the CRN is able to offer $2,000-3,000 in donations.

These donations have been helpful to the organizations, but money remains a fundamental obstacle for CRN 6. Day of Dialogue events often launch ongoing intellectual relationships, but sex workers who are invited to participate on panels at LSA can’t always afford to attend. While LSA is able to waive registration fees for these participants, other travel expenses often prove insurmountable. Individual sponsorships have helped; one Australian faculty member paid for his co-presenter, a sex worker from Montreal, to attend LSA and present their work, while a senior researcher sponsored three or four different women before her recent retirement.

“She was like our sugar mommy,” Dr. Raguparan quips.

But as CRN 6’s network continues to expand, so too does the desire for, not just further collaboration, but also straightforward connection. So when news of LSA’s 2026 Advance Grant application crossed the desk of Brock University Professor Julie Ham, one of Dr. Raguparan’s CRN 6 co-chairs, she got to work.

Now that the initial surprise has subsided, the answer is obvious. They are going to throw the biggest Day of Dialogue so far—in San Francisco, a city with a rich history of queer, countercultural activism, and the location of the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting. Since Dr. Raguparan and Professor Ham were in San Francisco for a different conference last year, they were able to start planning earlier than usual, meeting with various groups in the area. The extra time and larger budget means that this year’s event will feature multiple organizations from both northern and southern California, such as DecrimSexWorkCA, Bay Area Workers Support (BAWS), Sex Workers’ Outreach Project – Los Angeles (SWOP LA), and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking – Los Angeles (Cast LA). With help from graduate student members of the CRN, some of whom are sex workers with their own connections, Dr. Raguparan expects a large turnout.

“We are hoping this year in San Francisco its going to be a collective of all sex workers from all the different groups that we have worked with so far,” she says. “At least one person from each will be able to come back, like a reunion.”

CRN 6 has never thrown an event of this scale—but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t required a ton of work over the years. Fortunately, Dr. Raguparan has the support of her four co-chairs: Julie Ham, Alex Nelson (University of Indianapolis), Kathryn Hausbeck Korgan (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), and Cherisse Francis (St. Mary’s University), as well as the many different volunteers over the years who have helped with DoD. Dr. Raguparan gives a special mention to University of Waterloo Professor Rashmee Singh, who facilitated the event in Chicago. Together, they maintain a feminist, collaborative leadership approach that privileges member input and feedback. This strategy includes a goal to always ensure that at least one co-chair is a sex worker.

“The co-chairs are very close,” says Dr. Raguparan. “We rely on each other for mentoring and troubleshooting and putting out fires.”

The at-times heavy workload, along with the challenge of juggling multiple time zones, means that co-chairs have had a fair amount of turnover through the years. To address this, CRN leaders are always keeping their eyes peeled for future recruits.

Willingness to follow through is a critical trait for anyone interested in building a life studying sex work—not only because of the importance of earning and maintaining trust among the population, but also because of the sheer persistence required to learn about and amplify the voices of people that mainstream culture seems committed to misunderstanding.

“There has been sex work scholarship happening for a long time. Scholars like Fran Shaver, Barb Brents, Kamala Kempadoo, all retired now, were doing this work for decades before I got into this field,” says Dr. Raguparan. “I am in awe of their work. Collectively they experienced many political setbacks in their efforts to decriminalize sex work, and still they were always ready for a fight, and to keep fighting…That’s the motivation that keeps me going every day in this job, every waking minute.”

That persistence, along with the generosity of countless sex workers across the globe, has established the foundation for a growing international community of workers and academics to support one another through the struggle for understanding, safety, and freedom—one day at a time.

Institution: 

University of California, Berkeley

Faculty Director, Center for the Study of Law and Society

Number of years as LSA member: 

31

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

27

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Member, Board of Trustees | 2005 – 2007

Member, Article Prize Committee | 2004 – 2005

Member, Kalven Prize Committee | 2008 – 2009

Member, Wheeler Prize Committee | 2008 – 2009

Member, Student Paper Prize Committee | 2002-2003

Chair, Student Paper Prize Committee | 2005 – 2006

Member, Nominations Committee | 2010 – 2011

Member, Law & Society Review Editorial Advisory Board

Other Association Affiliations:

American Sociological Association

American Association of Law Schools

American Bar Foundation

Work and Family Researchers Network

California Bar Association

Areas of Research:

Law and Social Change

Inequality in Employment

Access to Justice

Public Interest Law, Democracy, and Civil Society

Legal Profession

Gender and Feminist Theory

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Law and Social Change

Social Movements and Law

Employment Discrimination

Gender, Law, and Society

Unique Skill or Fact:

Many years ago, I looked to see who Google thought I was based on my search history. At work, Google thought I was a man interested in law and statistics. At home, Google thought I was a woman interested in travel and shopping. No idea who Google thinks I am now…

Additional Hobbies:

Hiking

Camping

Reading fiction

Crochet

Gardening

Hanging out with my dog(s) and family

Notable Awards and Grants:

Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Senior Faculty | 2016

Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University | 2012 – 2013

Law and Society Association Article Prize | 2012

Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize | 2002

Skadden Fellow | 1995 – 1997

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Institutional Inequality and the Mobilization of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Rights on Leave (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

“Law’s Normative Influence on Gender Schemas: An Experimental Study on Counteracting Workplace Bias Against Mothers and Caregivers,” (Law & Social Inquiry, 2024).

“Bargaining in the Shadow of Social Institutions: Competing Discourses and Social Change in Workplace Mobilization of Civil Rights,” (Law & Society Review, 2005).

Education:

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley | Jurisprudence and Social Policy

J.D. University of California, Berkeley

M.A. Stanford University | Sociology

B.A. Stanford University | Psychology

Major Appearances:

Law, Norms, and the Motherhood/Caretaker Bias, AALS Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality, Washington, D.C., June 21, 2011.

Democracy, Civil Society, and Public Interest Law, Paul M. Van Arsdell, Jr. Memorial Lecture on Litigation and the Legal Profession, University of Illinois School of Law, February 7, 2020.

Can Law Mitigate the Motherhood/Caretaker Bias? Weatherhead Center, Harvard University, May 3, 2019.

The Dispute Tree and the Legal Forest, Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, November 17, 2016

Cultural Meanings of Gender and Inequality, Presidential Panel, Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 10, 2013.

Rights on Leave: The Family and Medical Leave Act in the Courts and in the Workplace, Keynote Address, Sixth Annual Midwest Family Law Consortium Workshop, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 5, 2013.

Rights on Leave, Clayman Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 25, 2012.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

The people! LSA members love to talk across disciplinary boundaries, generally are warm and engaging people, and know how to have a good time. I have made so many friends over the years and look forward to the annual meetings to catch up with everyone.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

Academic careers are all about serendipity. Meeting someone with common interests, going to a thought-provoking panel, discovering a new area of inquiry – all can lead to ideas, dissertations, publications, jobs, research grants, etc. LSA is the only place for those interested in law and society to interact with scholars across many disciplines who engage with law. There are so many unexplored interesting questions at the intersections of disciplines, but you don’t hear much about these at single discipline meetings. Attending a LSA meeting is a master class in how to do interdisciplinary scholarship successfully. And LSA provides so many opportunities for professional development for students and faculty, all in a friendly, inclusive environment.

Learn more about KT Albiston, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

Institution: 

University of California, Irvine

Number of years as LSA member: 

32

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

~25

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Coordinator, Immigration and Citizenship CRN | 1999-2005

Member, Board of Trustees | Class of 2014 and 2004

Member, Program Committee | 2007-2008, 1999-2000, 1997-1998

Co-Chair, Graduate Student Activity Committee | 2011-2012

Member, Herbet Jacob Book Prize Committee | 2009-2010

Member, Article Prize Committee | 2008-2009

Member, Nominations Committee | 2004, 2007

Member, International Affairs Committee | 2005

Chair, Law and Society Review Book Editor Search Committee | 2003

Member, Conditions of Work Committee | 2001-2002

Chair, Conditions of Work Committee | 2000-2001

Member, Dissertation Prize Committee | 1998-1999

Member, International Meetings Planning Committee | 1998-1999

Other Association Affiliations:

American Anthropological Association

Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

American Ethnological Association

Latin American Studies Association

Areas of Research:

Immigration

Culture

Documents

Central America

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Ethnography

Unique Skill or Fact:

I play the clarinet in a community band and we have concerts pretty regularly. It’s really fun!

Additional Hobbies:

Hiking

Swimming

Reading

Notable Awards and Grants:

Best Article Prize (with Bill Maurer and Barbara Yngvesson), Law and Society Association | 2003

Dean’s Award for Inclusive Excellence in Research, University of Irvine School of Social Ecology | 2017

Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Authority Grant | 2014-2015

Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Grant, Department of Education | 2010-2013

Research and Writing Grant, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation | 2004-2005

Research-to-Action Planning Grant, Haynes Foundation | 2025

Law and Social Science Program Research Grant, National Science Foundation | 2020-2023, 2015-2019, 2011-2015, 2006-2010, 2000-2003, 1995-1997

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Documenting Impossible Realities: Ethnography, Memory and the “As If.” (Cornell University Press, 2023) (with Barbara Yngvesson)

Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law. (Stanford University Press, 2024) (With Jennifer Chacón, Stephen Lee, and Sameer Ashar)

On the Record: Papers, Immigrants, and Legal Advocacy. (University of California Press, 2025)

Education:

PhD, Stanford University | Anthropology

MA, Stanford University | Anthropology

BA, University of California, Berkeley | Anthropology

Major Appearances:

Book Talk, Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Executive Action. Presented jointly with Jenifer Chacón and Stephen Lee. Stanford University, School of Law

Book Talk, Documenting Impossible Realities: Ethnography, Memory and the “As If”. Presented jointly with Barbara Yngvesson. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Book Presentation, On the Record: Papers, Immigrants, and Legal Advocacy. Colloquium Series, American Bar Foundation.

“Welcoming Migrants in the City” Symposium Keynote Address. Presented jointly with Walter Nicholls. University of Toulouse

Paper Presentation, “Re/membering: Histories of Violence, Survival, and Solidarity in Relation to Central America Migration to the U.S.” Migration Studies Initiative: An Interdisciplinary Conversation on Migration Research in Theory and Practice, Brown University

Paper Presentation, “The Right to Have Rights: Noncitizens’ Notions of Belonging, Membership, and Deservingness.” International Symposium: De-Exceptionalizing Displacement: Rethinking Citizenship and Mobility, University of Pittsburgh

Paper Presentation, “Enclosures and Exclusions: Histories of Violence Toward Central Americans.” Central American Migration Symposium, Center for Latin American Studies, Rutgers University

Paper Presentation, “Borders and Crossings: Lessons of the 1980s Central American Solidarity Movement for 2010s Sanctuary Practices.” Sanctuary and Subjectivity Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

For me, LSA has been a rich intellectual community! I’ve appreciated the chance to gather with scholars who share my interests, as well as with those who stretch my thinking and knowledge in new directions. I have appreciated the ways that the Association values diversity and inclusion, and I’m happy to be part of an organization that gives thought to making newcomers feel welcome. How many organizations have an annual “Fun Run,” for example?

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

For professionals and students, joining LSA is a great way to meet colleagues who care about policy questions, mentorship, and building community around a host of sociolegal issues. As an interdisciplinary association, LSA can bridge divides between the academy and the policy world, methodological approaches, theoretical traditions, and generations of scholars and practitioners.

Learn more about Susan Bibler Coutin, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

Institution: 

University of Toronto

American Bar Foundation (affiliated)

Distributed AI Research Institute (affiliated)

Number of years as LSA member: 

21

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

15

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Secretary | 2025 – 2027

Board of Trustees | 2022 – 2025

Co-Chair, Graduate Student/Early Career Workshop | 2022

Other Association Affiliations:

American Sociological Association

Areas of Research:

Institutional Responses to Social Movements

Law, Race, Racism

Employment Discrimination

Cultural Meanings of Law

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Law, Race, & Racism

Campus Protest & University Responses

Qualitative & Mixed Methods

Unique Skill or Fact:

I love roller-skating in skate parks. I’m not very good. I’m there for the fun, movement, community, and humility. My favorite move is riding the walls of a big bowl.

Additional Hobbies:

Political activism, camping, riding my bike, going on adventures

Notable Awards:

Distinguished Book Prize Honorable Mention, Sociology of Law section, American Sociological Association | 2018

Herbert Jacob Book Prize, Law & Society Association | 2016

Distinguished Book Prize, Sociology of Law section, American Sociological Association | 2016

Mary Douglas Book Prize Honorable Mention, Sociology of Culture section, American Sociological Association | 2016

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Berrey, Ellen. 2015. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press.

Berrey, Ellen; Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen. 2017. Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality. University of Chicago Press.

Berrey, Ellen; Alex Hanna, Nathan Kim, and Kristen Bass. 2024. “Higher Education Protests and University and Police Responses in the United States and Canada, 2012-2018.” Socius 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231241297447

Education:

PhD, Northwestern University | Sociology

BA, Brown University

Antioch College

Major Appearances:

“The Limits of ‘Diversity.’” The New Yorker, October 2, 2017. (Book Review of The Enigma of Diversity)

“Banned from Her Convocation.” CBC News, Radio Active, July 8, 2025.

“Racist dog whistle: the right wing has weaponized ‘DEI’” The Guardian, April 21, 2024.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

The cross-disciplinary intellectual community of LSA keeps me coming back every year. The scholars I have met through LSA are among the smartest, most generous people I know. Being part of the LSA community sharpens my research on law, making it more precise, insightful, and impactful.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

LSA is a terrific intellectual and professional home for scholars who study the roles of law in society. For students, its annual meetings and Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) provide forums to deepen their understanding of sociolegal research and connect with both peers and established professors. I highly recommend applying for the Early Career/Graduate Student Workshop – an invaluable setting for focused feedback and building networks. For professionals, the association offers ongoing opportunities to sustain, deepen, and reinvigorate our scholarship and our connections to each other.

What sets LSA apart is its interdisciplinary core. LSA uniquely brings together scholars from various fields and areas of expertise, with a shared curiosity about the social life of law. What happens when a law scholar, a sociologist, an English professor, and a psychologist gather in the same room to discuss campus protest, racism, or corporate organization? Join LSA and find out!

Learn more about Ellen Berrey, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 40: Disability Legal Studies. 

Unlike many students, Doron Dorfman entered graduate school with a clear goal. He was determined to teach and conduct empirical research on disability law. But in 2014, Stanford University wasn’t sure what to do with him.

“There were no people doing disability studies at Stanford in those days…I went from department to department to find people who might be interested,” he explains. “I remember I was in the political science department and they said, ‘Oh, social security benefits!’ Because for them disability was social security benefits…it was a very siloed, very marginalized area.”

Professor Dorfman, who now works at Seton Hall Law School, became the first person to teach disability studies at Stanford, and one of the first scholars to talk about disability identity in legal scholarship. He remains one of few researchers to do empirical work in the area—but as the topic of disability becomes more mainstream, he hopes more scholars will join him.

“I think what’s really hard is that disability’s kind of new…its really trendy, but it’s still a little new, so the old guard maybe doesn’t think about it all the time,” he says. “Even, for example, when you go on the job market. No school, almost, is looking for disability rights…I hope that one day I will open listings for law professors that will actually say, ‘We are looking for a disability rights person.’”

This is one of the goals of CRN 40: Disability Legal Studies, which Professor Dorfman co-chairs alongside York University Osgoode Hall Law School doctoral candidate Odelia Bay. Founded by University of Haifa Professor Sagit Mor, Professor Dorfman’s mentor, as well as University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Professor and outgoing Law and Society Review co-editor Katharina Heyer, CRN 40 originally had the unwieldy task of justifying its own existence amongst fellow law and society scholars yet to develop the habit of identifying the “disability angle” inherent to most research areas. As intersectionality has become more firmly entrenched in sociolegal inquiry, and especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the group has been able to focus more of its energy on gathering scholars interested in disability together. But recruitment, for lack of a better term, remains key to the CRN’s activities. On one occasion, Professor Dorfman presented a paper about service dogs and emotional support animals on a panel held by CRN 42: Law and Emotion.

“There’s a lot of people who might not have come to a disability panel, who came to that panel, and that gave us a lot of exposure,” says Professor Dorfman. “I vividly remember presenting that paper and getting a lot of feedback and attention.”

“What used to happen,” he continues, “is that there would be a panel, and there would be a person who studies disability on the panel. We wanted to have a whole space where all people who do disability come together…Disability studies is such a broad interdisciplinary field, so we can have people from all areas, right? Every area intersects with disability, from immigration to criminal law to health.”

Despite its relative obscurity over the years, disability scholarship and advocacy has a rich and complex history. In 1976, a UK disability rights organization called the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) developed what came to be called the “social model of disability,” positing that society itself, rather than physical impairment, “disabled” people by failing to provide the accommodations necessary for individuals with unique needs to participate in daily life. This radical departure from the medical model, which framed disability as merely the result of unfortunate medical circumstances, challenged the prevailing view of disability as a burden to be shouldered solely by individuals and their loved ones. By acknowledging the inherent value in all people, including those with various medical challenges, and adjusting physical and social infrastructure accordingly, society could collectively make room for everybody to live full, rich lives. This concept is a key facet of the “Disability Justice” movement, developed in 2005 by a radical dance group in Berkeley, CA, Sins Invalid, in a manifesto calling for increased intersectionality and inclusivity amongst disability activists.

The social model revolutionized perceptions and discourse regarding disability—but in some ways, it overcorrected in its emphasis on the collective over the individual.

“Through the years, there has been a lot of criticism of the social model, because it excludes the experiences of the body, of pain, and of what it actually means to be disabled,” says Professor Dorfman. “And it also was really all about physical disability, not so much mental disability, developmental disability, or chronic illness, for example.”

To address this issue, Professor Dorfman and his peers favor the more nuanced biopsychosocial model, which integrates physical limitations, mental perceptions, and social environments in its definition of disability.

“What the biopsychosocial model did is bring impairment back into the conversation…being disabled is not always fun and games. There is a role for pain, and there is a role for all of those issues,” Professor Dorfman says.

Equipped with this more refined framework, as well as a mixed-methods, experimental approach, Professor Dorfman has spent the better part of the last two decades making his own mark on the field of disability studies.  He has written about perceptions of disability fraud in public settings, Covid-era mask shaming (in both directions), and the experience of claiming social security benefits as a disabled person. His article, “Re-Claiming Disability: Identity, Procedural Justice and the Disability Determination Process,” won an award from the Library of Congress and was discussed at length in a federal court decision. He has testified before the United States Congress on the relationship between vaccine requirements and anti-discrimination law, and some of his writing formed the basis of a wave of lawsuits regarding mask accommodations in schools.

“That was really wonderful, to see how scholarship can really influence legal mobilization,” he says.

Professor Dorfman attributes his success, in part, to his involvement with the CRN.

“I found out about the CRN, and LSA more generally, when I started grad school,” he says. “So I grew up with Law and Society. The conference has been a part of my academic journey since day one.”

Like all Collaborative Research Networks, CRN 40 benefits from a diverse mix of scholars, representing various regional differences in disability studies. U.S. members tend to explore disability studies from a humanities angle that centers literature and critical studies. Members from Canada, like Professor Bay, as well as various European countries, are more focused on policy and social change. Each year, CRN 40 holds a panel on Canadian Disability Law; when possible, they collaborate with other CRNs, such as CRN 42 and CRN 09: Law and Health.

“We invite CRNs who talk about other marginalized identities to think about doing a panel on the experiences of those in their community with a disability,” says Professor Dorfman.  “We also invite people who have real life experiences to come and talk at our CRN at Law and Society….people who are professionals with disabilities, whether they’re professors or judges.”

Disability studies is no longer as peripheral to the law and society world as it once was—but after watching the post-Covid-19 boost in disability rights awareness peter out with minimal change, Professor Dorfman is determined to continue pushing CRN 40 forward with the same stubborn focus that he brought with him to Stanford—which now explicitly recruits disability studies scholars—eleven years ago.

“People with disabilities are sometimes perceived as really pushy and demanding,” he admits, “because they are navigating a world that is not made for them. They’re trying to get a seat at the table so they can change the world by pushing for greater diversity.”

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 04: Lay Participation in Legal Systems. 

In the United States, few things trigger mixed feelings more reliably than receiving a jury duty summons in the mail. Most citizens appreciate the importance of juries to democracy, and are intrigued about what to expect from the experience. However, the prospect of juggling this civic duty with the daily demands of career, health, and family life can be stressful. This, as well as the possibility of sitting in a jury box for days to weeks, listening to the potentially boring and/or distressing facts of a case before deliberating with a group of random strangers, is enough to give many people pause.

Thankfully, though, research indicates that many jury duty survivors come away with a positive view of their experience.

“Serving as a lay judge, or as a juror, really has an impact,” says Cornell Law School Professor Valerie Hans. “Most people who are selected and serve on a jury come out of it with positive views about their jury service, and in fact become more favorable toward the courts.”

To be sure, participating in the legal decision-making process as a citizen offers numerous potential benefits. Real-world courtroom experience can provide greater context for how and why decisions are made. Having a direct impact on an issue, no matter how small, can be empowering. And, most provocatively for 2025, working toward a common goal with people who have different beliefs and perspectives can have a unifying effect. It turns out that being compelled to step outside of one’s social comfort zone can promote greater understanding of fellow citizens, and society more generally.

“There’s been a couple of op–eds recently about people who served on a jury,” says University of Texas at Austin Professor Mary Rose. “Both of them have pointed out how powerful it was to be thrown in a room with people that you really would not associate with otherwise, especially today where we can segregate so easily. And to have to solve a problem together and work out differences and everything, it is a very unusual and empowering and democratic experience.”

No one understands the transformative power of collaboration better than lay participation scholars, who study juries, mixed courts, and other models of citizen participation in legal decision-making. Professor Hans and her research collaborator, Michigan State University Professor Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, decided to harness this power in 2001, when they created one of LSA’s first Collaborative Research Networks, CRN 4: Lay Participation in Legal Systems. Professor Rose, who now co-chairs CRN 4 with Professors Hans and Kutnjak Ivković, joined the  group at the launch of its first organized meetings, which were part of the annual meeting in Budapest; she was delighted to have such an organized way to surround herself with scholars who had her same interests, but different specializations, disciplines, preferred methodologies, and cultural backgrounds.

“If you were to say someone is a jury scholar…the way Valerie and I came up, you would probably be talking primarily about a social psychologist and someone who was trained in, and maybe even privileges, the experimental methodology,” Professor Rose explains.

“It was exciting because before, the work by people who studied these different types of lay participation was quite scattered,” Professor Hans adds. “Law and Society might have a panel or two on some particular topic, like a jury panel. But there wasn’t any concerted effort to draw people together who studied the challenges, but also benefits, that come from having lay people participate in legal decision making.”

It’s easy to see why lay participation scholars have been so scattered. Many countries have adopted some form of legal participation for lay citizens, generally in the hopes of enhancing a legal system’s perceived legitimacy, reducing bias and judicial corruption, and infusing diverse perspectives and community values into the legal process. But no two lay participation systems are the same, informed as they are by each country’s unique political, legal, social, and cultural realities. A single scholar could spend an entire career focusing on just one aspect of lay participation, or on a single country’s approach. CRN 4 members, however, find that their own scholarship is enhanced when they learn from one another.

“It’s given me a better sense of the political nature of lay participation and what it means to people. Also the importance of context, including political context, social context, and legal context,” says Professor Hans. “A number of the other countries who are represented in our CRN…have a radically different legal tradition from the US. I mean, we have the common law tradition, and they have a civil law tradition.”

Common vs. civil law is one of the most foundational differences underpinning each country’s approach to lay participation. Generally speaking, common law countries that champion precedent, interpretation, and independence tend to use the jury system, while countries with a more “by-the-book” civil law tradition often rely on the mixed court system. Juries are entirely composed of lay citizens serving limited terms, often only the length of one case. These shorter commitments allow for more diverse juries, who benefit from a broader range of strengths and perspectives when deliberating. They also minimize pressure to appease judges or other officials, who they are unlikely to encounter in the future. This greater independence can be challenging, however, as juries with minimal professional guidance and experience may feel unsupported.  Mixed courts combine professional judges with citizen judges, who are selected for terms that can last several years. Lay judges get to accumulate experience and build relationships over time, benefiting from the expertise of their professional counterparts. However, this leaves them more vulnerable to influence from the professional judges who may have their own agendas.

But even ostensibly similar countries can have wildly different lay participation systems. For instance, the word “jury” has numerous definitions, depending on where you are.

“Our collaborators from Argentina would say that if we were to transplant a jury, it would feel like a Trojan horse, because it would require so many changes in the criminal procedure, and maybe criminal law as well,” Professor Kutnjak Ivković explains. “You might typically think about a traditional English jury of twelve people making decisions about guilt, whereas they can be advisory juries, they can be juries who are not deliberating at all. Like in Brazil, they simply vote on the decision.”

By creating a respectful space for exploring these differences, CRN 4 has become a resource, not just for scholars, but for governments around the globe. Professor Hans, Professor Kutnjak Ivković, and other CRN members, such as Northwestern Law School/American Bar Foundation Research Professor Shari Diamond, have worked as consultants for the Japanese and Argentinian governments, among others. Professor Hans was particularly inspired by her work with South Korea, who sought her perspective after establishing an advisory jury system.

“It was absolutely fascinating to be able to bring the kind of expertise our group had together with people who had country knowledge and were able to talk about…how they were trying to prepare for the introduction of these new systems of lay participation in their countries,” says Professor Hans.

“I really feel that the Law and Society Association, and the way we conceive being open to different systems, has helped that international collaboration,” adds Professor Rose. “Because you could imagine it being like, Valerie goes down to Argentina and tells them how the jury system is supposed to work…and it was very much not that.”

Running CRN 4 allows Professors Hans, Kutnjak Ivković, and Rose to recreate these opportunities for cultural and intellectual exchange. The network regularly teams up with CRN 33: East Asian Law and Society to co-sponsor panel discussions. With financial assistance from LSA, they have been able to help scholars from South America attend annual meetings. In addition to hosting special CRN dinners each year, the group embarks on field trips—at the annual meeting in Chicago earlier this summer, they toured federal and state courts, something they plan to repeat at next year’s annual meeting in San Francisco. The group stays up to date via their listserv, as well as their webpage.

These moments of connection, both big and small, have benefited members, and the field of lay participation as a whole.  Several ongoing research projects trace their origins back to CRN 4, and in 2021, Professors Hans and Kutnjak Ivković, along with Professor Diamond and Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Nancy S. Marder, released an edited volume, Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts: A Global Perspective.

Maintaining a group’s momentum for 24 years is no small task, but for the three professors, the rewards have been worth the struggle—the collective struggle, that is.

“What you realize is—it’s kind of corny—it takes a village,” says Professor Hans. “It needs collaboration among a large number of people to make it work.”

Professor Rose agrees. “It comes with the spirit that, I think, Law and Society cultivates in scholars…‘What do you need, and how can I be helpful?’…it is seeing fruit, but it is a particular kind of cooperative, collaborative fruit.”

Institution: 

Suffolk University Law School

Clinical Professor of Law, Founding Director of Immigrant Justice Clinic

Number of years as LSA member: 

10

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

4

Other Association Affiliations:

Association of American Law Schools

Areas of Research:

Migration Studies

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Movement Lawyering

Immigrant Justice

Migrants’ Social Movements

Unique Skill or Fact:

After working as a lawyer for two years defending tenants in south Brooklyn facing eviction, I took a break to pursue my passion for acting. I was honored to join the Rising Circle Theater Collective, a group of artists of color who self-wrote and produced original works of theater. I spent five years with the Collective and acted in three different productions during that time.

Additional Hobbies:

Paddleboarding

Travel

Learning new languages

Notable Awards:

Justice at Work Solidarity Award | 2024

Suffolk Women’s Alumni Association Teaching Award | 2024

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities (University of California Press, 2024)

“Laying the Legal Foundation for A Right to Stay in Deported Americans,” 50 Southwestern Law Review 319 (2020).

“Sharing the American Dream: Towards Formalizing Status for Long Term Resident Immigrant Youth,” 39 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 637 (2008).

Education:

JD, Northeastern University

BS, Northwestern University | Social Policy

Major Appearances:

“Unpacking Immigration Policy in the 2024 Presidential Race,” Election Connection, October 31, 2024.

“A showdown of prosecutors looms as DA mulls charges against ICE agent,” WBUR Morning Edition, April 14, 2025.

“Massachusetts Has Eight Sanctuary Cities and How They Cooperate Varies,” CBS News Boston, September 15, 2022.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

LSA has allowed me unparalleled access to scholarship from experts outside of my field. As a legal scholar, it has been vital to my own research and teaching to hear from people in the social sciences and humanities whose approach to migration has informed my own understanding beyond the legal rules and experiences of clients. It was attending LSA that helped inspire me to conduct further research into Mexican migration, which ultimately led me to publish a book on the topic.

Each year, I hear about work that I never would have heard about but for the conference. Just this past year, I attended the New Books in History panel and discovered The Migrant’s Jail by Brianna Nofil. Now that I have had a chance to review the book, I will be using it in my class.

It is this access to people writing on issues that intersect with the law, but who are writing from perspectives outside of the legal academy, that has been most useful to me as a legal scholar.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

For legal scholars in particular, LSA provides access to peers whose approaches are more empirical and more grounded in the experiences of those impacted by legal rules. For anyone looking to expand their scholarship beyond their own discipline, I think LSA is a must-attend conference. And for those already doing interdisciplinary work, LSA provides a unique space to workshop ideas and gain input from other people committed to interdisciplinary work.

The size of the LSA conference offers the opportunity for a scholar’s work to become widely known.

LSA membership also gives scholars access to LSA’s grants and consideration for LSA’s awards.

Learn more about Ragini Shah, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations here.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chilean scholars mounted the first real challenge to this dominant legal culture by developing a rich tradition of law and society scholarship. Unsurprisingly, domestic institutions were resistant to this challenge, forcing researchers to work with foreign partners like Stanford University. Their work came to a complete halt when Augusto Pinochet rose to power in 1973—but not before elements of their thinking were co-opted.  Pinochet’s regime leveraged sociolegal beliefs like legal instrumentalism to help entrench neoliberal capitalism in the country.

“The Chilean case is a great example of how we can also get unintended consequences from the law and development movement, when these efforts are abstracted from local knowledge, local power battles, local power wars,” said Cardoso, now an Associate Professor at Santo Tomas University in Temuco, Chile. “Many of these scholars couldn’t maintain their research agenda under the dictatorship…many were exiled, and they were unable to foster the field from abroad.”

Pinochet’s regime largely succeeded in thwarting sociolegal scholarship, leaving much of the movement’s discourse lost to history. Yet more than fifty years later, the appetite for understanding law’s human impact has not faded.

Professor Cardoso is one of many scholars in Chile pushing for the field’s redevelopment. Originally from Brazil, he studied sociology in undergrad before pivoting to law, eventually obtaining his master’s degree in social science at the University of Sao Paulo (FFLCH-USP). This trajectory trained Cardoso to understand law through a more sociological lens—and to find his experience as a doctoral candidate at the University of Chile’s law department to be less than inspiring.

Cardoso discovered that he wasn’t alone in his frustration. After participating in a panel discussion, he found himself sitting next to Salvador Millaleo, a professor at the University of Chile (Santiago). They connected over their shared interest in legal pluralism and Latin American indigenous rights. “[It] quickly turned into the beginning of a very great friendship, which became a rich intellectual connection,” Cardoso recalled.

Their connection deepened at the Chilean Constitutional Convention in 2021-2022. Millaleo was presenting to indigenous representatives at the Convention, while Cardoso was working as an ethnographer for his dissertation.

“Salvador was like the main voice in Chile supporting the creation of a plurinational state,” Cardoso said with admiration.

Millaleo connected Cardoso with many of the key individuals he needed to enhance his research, essentially becoming his “de facto thesis advisor.” Although their proposed Constitutional amendments ultimately failed, Millaleo and Cardoso were becoming a formidable duo, jointly determined to continue their opposition to Chile’s legal orthodoxy by reviving the long dormant law and society movement through the lens of global legal pluralism.

This undertaking has both a social and scholarly component as it connects scholars across the country while also reviving and building upon work from the past. The Annual Congress of the Chilean Community of Sociolegal Research, started in 2018, has been a critical first step in uniting contemporary scholars. Despite the relative dearth of written or recorded material, this initiative has advanced due to help from surviving members of the original movement

“They are retired, but they are still alive,” Millaleo says. “Our objective is to recover the oral memories about this time.”

Millaleo and Cardoso were already discussing ways to preserve this history in an article or book when they encountered the LSA Programming Grant call for proposals. Meeting over another fateful lunch, the two mapped out their idea in one sitting: a mentorship program that would bring scholars from northern and southern Chile together to share knowledge about their lost sociolegal history.

With their proposal awarded, they created an eight-week workshop series on law and society topics hosted jointly by the University of Chile, Santiago and Santo Tomás University, Temuco – in both hybrid and in-person formats. Participants came from across Chile and beyond, including Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, China, and the United States. Collectively, they brought backgrounds in criminology, psychology, geography, and anthropology. Over the course of the workshops, they explored topics like constitutional ethnography, legal imperialism, gender and law, legal culture, semiotics, law and the arts, the genealogy of law and society in Chile, and global legal pluralism.

The sessions made a strong impression on attendees. In southern Chile, some students had never heard spoken English or met an “intellectual” in person. Others, including a master’s student in the north, were surprised to learn that Chile even had a law and society tradition. One student entered the program as a right-wing supporter of Pinochet’s dictatorship.

“We had this session on indigenous rights from a very progressive anthropologist,” Cardoso recalled. “And that transformed my student…he was like, ‘I just want to thank you, I never thought about any of these subjects we’re discussing.’”

Cardoso was also struck by the students’ enthusiasm after the workshop ended.

“Some [students] emailed me asking whether the program would still endure,” he said, “And some offered to be an assistant and help in the organization of future workshops. That was a very great surprise.”

Energized by the successful workshops, Millaleo and Cardoso are excitedly planning their next steps. They intend to repeat the program with refinements based on their initial experiences. To avoid bureaucratic delays, the pair hope to partner with external organizations for support. They also plan to update some of the subject matter.

“Right now, we know that people in southern Chile want to study indigenous rights,” Cardoso noted. “No bioconstitutionalism, you know, they are not interested in that.”

The pair also intend to write an article compiling lessons from the workshops, which they plan to publish as an e-book, and potentially a special issue of a Chilean journal such as Derecho y Crítica Social. Their ultimate goal is to establish a Chilean Law and Society Association, which they hope will make it easier to attract funding and support from many different universities.

“The dictatorship broke this development, but the memory remains” says Millaleo. “So that is the basis of these efforts in the new century, to resume this work.”

To view some of the recorded lectures and learn more about Chilean law and society efforts, check out The Chilean Law & Society Program on YouTube and @programaderechoysociedad on Instagram.

Institution: 

University of California, Irvine, School of Law and Criminology

Number of years as LSA member: 

25

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

I am not sure of the actual number. At the urging of law school friends who are also graduates of the Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) program, I attended my first meeting as an independent scholar in Miami Beach in 2000. I was "hooked" from that moment on. I returned to graduate school at Wisconsin in 2002 and believe I have attended every meeting--including the two COVID virtual meetings--since Pittsburgh in 2003.

Other Association Affiliations:

Fellows of the American Bar Foundation

Critical Legal Collective

American Law Institute

National Institute of Military Justice

Areas of Research:

Law and inequality

Empirical methods and critical race theory (eCRT)

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

It has historically been constitutional law, although that is now changing.

Unique Skill or Fact:

Before my knee surgery in 2019, I had run 6 marathons (San Francisco, Guam-Seiko, Marine Corps, New York City, Chicago, and Las Vegas).

Best time: San Francisco 1994 (3:24).

Best Finish: Guam-Seiko 1997 - Men's Open Winner (don't ask how many people were in the race).

Additional Hobbies:

Tennis

Traveling

Walking (because my running days are over)

Wine collecting

Notable Awards:

Justice at Work Solidarity Award | 2024

Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar Award | 2023

Association of American Law Schools Clyde Ferguson Award | 2015

Association of American Law Schools Derrick Bell Award | 2008

Education:

LLM, University of Wisconsin

JD, University of California, Berkeley

BA, University of California, Berkeley

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

Being an LSA member and attending the annual meetings has situated me within an amazing group of sociolegal scholars. Access to this rich and intellectually diverse community has always benefited me and my work and allows me to participate within a space deeply committed to addressing some of the most pressing issues within law and society.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

People should only join LSA if they are interested in enhancing their scholarship/research, being a part of a vibrant intellectual community, and establishing meaningful professional and personal connections that will sustain them throughout their careers.

Learn more about Mario Barnes here.

Institution: 

Santa Clara University School of Law

Number of years as LSA member: 

5

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

5

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Co-Chair, Collaborative Research Network 02: Citizenship and Immigration

Other Association Affiliations:

ClassCrits

LatCrit

Critical Legal Collective

National Lawyers Guild

Society of American Law Teachers

Areas of Research:

critical race theory

critical legal theory

citizenship and migration

law and political economy

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Immigration, Criminality and the Constitution

Additional Hobbies:

Seeing and making art in various mediums.

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

“(Un)Equal Immigration Protection,” 50 Southwestern Law Review 232 (2021)

“Systemic Racism and Immigration Detention,” 44 Seattle University Law  Review 1125 (2021)

“Bringing Democratic Rule of Law to Immigration (In the Age of Trump),” 97 Denver Law Review (2020)

Education:

JD, University of California, Davis School of Law

BA, University of Santa Barbara | Interdisciplinary Studies

Major Appearances:

Carrie Rosenbaum & Linus Chan, “Trump’s Paramilitary Units Trained at the Border for the Assaults on Portland Moms.” Slate, July 2020

Ediberto Roman & Carrie Rosenbaum, “Reversal on Trump’s Student Visa Curbs Exposes Flawed Policy Efforts.” Bloomberg Law, July 2020

Ediberto Roman, Carrie Rosenbaum and Geoffrey Hoffman, “DACA Victory at Supreme Court Is Precarious at Best.” Newsweek, June 2020

Carrie Rosenbaum, Laila Hlass, Maureen Sweeney, and Elora Mukherjee, “Let Immigration Judges Speak.” Slate, October 2019

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

The community and opportunity for exchange of ideas and camaraderie.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

Professionals and students should join LSA to support the development of ideas, find community, develop and shape one’s professional identity, make friends, be a mentor, get inspired, and help lift up the work of others.

Learn more about Carrie Rosenbaum, her many publications, media appearances, and involvement with academic organizations by viewing her website here.

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 02: Citizenship and Immigration. 

Like many LSA members, Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Carrie Rosenbaum has found that her work doesn’t fit neatly within traditional disciplinary boundaries.

“I had been attending the Immigration Law Teacher and Scholars’ Workshop, where I found a kind, supportive, and engaged scholarly community,” she says. “However, as an interdisciplinary scholar I was in search of an even more intellectually expansive community. I found it in the law and society world, and LSA in particular.”

During a stint as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley School of Law, Professor Rosenbaum discovered LSA and Collaborative Research Network 02: Citizenship and Immigration (CRN 02). Her involvement with LSA began in 2019, when she served as a commentator at an Author Meets Reader (AMR) session for Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, written by Ohio State Moritz College of Law Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.

In 2020, Washington State University Professor Hillary Mellinger and California Western School of Law Professor Pooja Dadhania, who were familiar with her scholarship and her founding of a national writing network for immigration scholars, asked her to moderate and provide feedback at their LSA Annual Meeting session. Recognizing the opportunity for mutual enrichment and support in LSA’s interdisciplinary environment, Professor Rosenbaum stuck around, going on to present at, chair, and moderate several more Annual Meeting sessions. At the 2025 meeting in Chicago, she participated in AMRs for University of Miami School of Law Professor Rebecca Sharpless’ new book, Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air, as well as Suffolk University School of Law Professor Ragini Shah’s new book, Constructed Movements, Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities.

Eventually, Professor Rosenbaum took on a leadership position in CRN 02 alongside Professor Mellinger and University of Michigan-Dearborn Professor Maya Barak. She derives great pleasure from working with her co-chairs, who she describes as generous, as well as reviewing presenter proposals and helping to coordinate conference sessions.

CRN 02 members study citizenship and immigration to understand the mechanisms that create “in” and “out” groups in society. In addition to examining labels such as race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and class, members are interested in the ways that globalization situates multiple legal orders with and against one another. The CRN facilitates discussions that allow members to deepen their scholarship through the exchange of feedback and ideas from people with a wide range of perspectives.

“Our mission is to connect scholars with each other, support interdisciplinary research, and foster potential collaboration and professional development for our community members,” she explains. “Ultimately, for me it’s really just the joy of learning and being in community.”

In addition to yearly events in conjunction with the LSA Annual Meetings, which include a business meeting, a new books panel, various roundtable sessions, and a social event (often co-sponsored by local immigrant rights organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Policy and Research at the University of Denver), CRN 02 experiments with other types of programming, such as professional development panels, local practitioner panels, and speed mentoring. A glance at some of the CRN’s 2025 Annual Meeting sessions in Chicago reveals the group’s unifying concern: critiquing and challenging oppressive systems and structures of authority that undermine social justice:

• How Puerto Rico’s Colonial Status Perpetuates Second-Class Citizenship of Puerto Ricans and Undermines the United States’ Commitment to Equitable Legal, Civil, Social, Economic Rights
• Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law
• Current Issues at the Intersection of Immigration Law and National Security in the United States and Europe
• Refugee Experience in Europe and Its Consequences for Minoritization

Ongoing events in the United States have made it a particularly fraught time for teachers, scholars, and public intellectuals in the area of immigration law. CRN 02 members provide one another with informal support as they navigate urgent questions about the most effective ways to use their voices in both public discourse and the classroom.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘crisis’ because there is no immigration ‘crisis’ in the sense we often hear,” Professor Rosenbaum says. “The actual crisis is the lawless perpetuation of egregious human rights violations, like imprisoning people trying to move across borders, separating family members from each other, and what some professors have called a threat to democracy and increasing administrative state illegitimacy.”

For Professor Rosenbaum, one of the most important tasks facing critical scholars of immigration at the moment is changing the narrative for mainstream audiences by making their research and findings legible to journalists at every level, from local reporters to those at publications like the New York Times. This could help combat the disorienting and paralyzing effects of disinformation from government officials that is repeated in the press.

Equally important is individual and collective reflection on a scholar’s role in social change. Indeed, the 2025 Annual Meeting programming might have been slightly different if it had been planned after the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

“I think a whole session could be dedicated to, ‘How do we do the work that we do? And do the ideas need to be any different? Why are we writing?’” Professor Rosenbaum says.

The growing urgency of these questions is at times invigorating, and other times terrifying. Recently, as her friends have similarly shared, Professor Rosenbaum has found herself either so full of ideas that she doesn’t know where to start, or so discouraged by the limitations of scholarship in addressing the real and immediate harms that she can only stare at a blank screen.

But if her career thus far is any indication, that screen will not remain blank for long. As a film theory and political science undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Rosenbaum studied under Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson, who cultivated in her a lifelong interest in the relationship between rights, race, and immigration. She was further inspired by Angela Davis and the Critical Resistance/Prison Abolition movements, so after graduating, she started a chapter of Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, an organization dedicated to criminal justice reform. Moved to take her advocacy to the next level, Professor Rosenbaum went to law school at the University of California, Davis, where Professor Millard Murphy was running one of the few Prison Law Clinics in the country at the time. When she started practicing immigration law in the wake of 9/11, she got involved with the National Lawyers Guild as a board member and Immigration Committee co-chair, supporting organizing efforts and providing pro bono representation for individuals picked up in immigration raids. Inspired by her UC Davis professors Kevin Johnson and Bill Ong Hing, she started writing on her own, publishing her first law review article without institutional support or research assistance. Thanks to generous support from her mentors—which has inspired her current passion for supporting the work of others—she published a new article each year, got invited to symposiums and panels, and developed a love for exchanging ideas that could potentially lead to social change.

“Scholars have a critical responsibility to use their positions of power to call out systemic oppression and injustice, to expand the conversation, and to explore creative visions for the future, particularly now,” Professor Rosenbaum says.

Acknowledging the varying levels of risk involved, she adds, “Colleagues have real concerns about how to continue doing this work in meaningful ways and without self-censorship.”

For some scholars, this looks like producing and disseminating knowledge that can support litigation efforts spearheaded by the ACLU, as well as law schools and immigration clinics around the country. For others, it means sharing their expertise in legal scholarship and legal practice with academics from other disciplines, who are increasingly turning their focus to immigration. Inevitably, though, legal scholars and practitioners will need to grapple with the vulnerability of a legal system based on checks and balances, rule of law, and other lofty concepts that require a consensus of individuals acting on good faith.

These challenges, destabilizing and existential, are difficult for even the most forward-thinking academics, which makes the need for community engagement and respectful critique particularly acute.

“Our CRN lets us explore overlaps in ideas, resources, and other research that we may not have found if we hadn’t had this opportunity to come together,” says Professor Rosenbaum. “Supportive engagement through the CRN and in the broader community strengthens our collective work, sets an example for our students, and allows us to more meaningfully conceptualize possibilities for transformative justice across lines of citizenship, formal membership, and belonging.”

Institution: 

The George Washington University Law School

Number of years as LSA member: 

16

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

12

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Co-Founder and Chair, CRN 39: Everyday Legality and Access to Justice | 2019 – Present

LSA Secretary | 2023 – 2025

Representative, Class of 2019 Board of Trustees | 2016 – 2019

Co-Founder and Chair, CRN 24: Law and Rurality | 2019 – 2025

Other Association Affiliations:

American Bar Foundation

Association of American Law Schools

American Sociological Association

International Sociological Association

Areas of Research:

Access to Justice

Legal Consciousness

Criminal Procedure

Legal Education

Parole

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Evidence

Multidistrict/complex litigation

Criminal Procedure

Sociology of Law

Professional Responsibility/Ethics

Access to Justice

Unique Skill or Fact:

I enjoy legal strategy at both the trial and appellate levels.

Additional Hobbies:

Reading fiction, gardening, traveling, hanging out with my spouse and our dogs.

Notable Awards:

Distinguished Faculty Award, George Washington University Law School | 2025

Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar Fellowship | 2023 – 2024

American Bar Foundation/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Fellowship | 2020 – 2021

University Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 2016

Law & Society Association Article Prize | 2015

American Sociological Association Distinguished Article Award (Sociology of Law Section) | 2015

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Forthcoming: “What Can Legal Knowledge Do for Access to Justice?”, Duke Law Journal (with Heidi H. Liu)

“Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital,” 54 Law & Society Review 33 (2020) (with Katie R. Billings).

“Everyone Knows the Game: Legitimacy and Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight,” 48 Law & Society Review 499 (2014)

Education:

PhD, Stanford University | Sociology

JD, Stanford Law School

MFA, Oregon State University | Creative Writing

BA, Stanford University | American Studies

Major Appearances:

My research has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple state supreme courts. My book, How to be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018) has been featured on multiple Amazon bestseller lists.

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

LSA typifies academia at its best—as a supportive and energizing collective endeavor. The ideas, collaborations, and friendships I’ve seen grow out of LSA are inspiring. We all come from different backgrounds, disciplinary and otherwise, and are committed to learning from each other, advancing the social scientific study of law and legality, and making each others’ research the best it can be.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

LSA is welcoming, warm, and a great space to try out ideas and meet new people.

Learn more about Kathryne M. Young, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations by viewing her website here.

Institution: 

University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Cape Town

Number of years as LSA member: 

18

Number of LSA Meetings Attended: 

11

LSA Governance Position(s) and Committees:

Representative, Class of 2026 Board of Trustees | 2024-2026

Member, Executive Committee | 2024–2026

Organizer, CRN 13: African Law and Society | 2022–present

Member, Program Committee | 2013–2014, 2021–2022

Member, Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop Committee | 2019–2020 and 2020–21

Other Association Affiliations:

American Anthropological Association

African Studies Association

Areas of Research:

Indigenous Law

Constitutionalism

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonialization

Legal Pluralism

Women’s Rights

Economic and Social Rights

Access to Justice

Legal Ethnography

Favorite Topics to Teach or Research:

Decolonizing Law

Human Rights-Based Approaches to Social Justice

Owning Property: Inequality in Law (aka Property and Social Justice)

Law, Societies and Global Justice

Constitutional Ethnography

Historical Linguistics as Sociolegal Archive (the alternative intellectual roots of the Ntu)

Unique Skill or Fact:

I descend from the former Swati royal line in precolonial Eswatini, so I like to say I’m kind of a princess. But, more seriously, I was so passionate about drama in high school that I auditioned for, and subsequently appeared in, a television show. (To my chagrin, I periodically hear about reruns many years after it was filmed).

I very nearly went to film school but, at the last minute, decided to go to law school after all. Since I’d been announcing my intention to be a lawyer from about eight years old, I feared I’d probably regret it if I didn’t, at the very least, give that path a good faith effort.

Additional Hobbies:

Music (singing, guitar)

Practicing languages

Traveling

Trying new cuisines

Studying pop psychology

Playing soccer with my kids

Notable Awards:

University of Massachusetts Amherst Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship | 2023-2024

Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship | 2015, 2017

National Research Foundation of South Africa, Y1 Rating | 2014-2019

South African Department of Science and Technology Women in Science Award – Emerging Researcher | 2012

Social Sciences Research Council – Mellon Mays Graduate Studies Enhancement Grant | 2008

Rhodes Scholarship, South Africa-at-Large and New College | 2005

Top Three Books and/or Publications:

Alter-Native Constitutionalism: Decolonising ‘Common’ Law to Transform South Africa (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023)

“South African Legal Culture and Its Dis/Empowerment Paradox,” Oxford Handbook of Law & Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa (Routledge, 2018)

Education:

DPhil, University of Oxford | Law and Socio-Legal Studies

MSt, University of Oxford | Legal Research

LLB, University of Cape Town (cum laude)

BA, University of Cape Town | Law, Philosophy and Language (with distinction)

Major Appearances:

“Sindiso MnisiWeeks and the Case for an Alter-Native Constitutionalism in South Africa,” The PALcast, June 10, 2024

“NH’s ‘Divisive Concepts’ Bill,” The Exchange, (New Hampshire Public Radio), May 5, 2021

“What Concerns Remain with the Traditional Courts Bill?” Eusebius McKaiser Show, (Talk Radio 702/Cape Talk), May 10, 2018

“Traditional Courts Bill,” Public Radio International (National Public Radio), June 21, 2012

“Judge for Yourself with Judge Dennis Davis,” ETV, May 2012

What do you find the most beneficial about being an LSA member?

From my first time attending the 2007 LSA Global Meeting in Berlin, Germany, the main thing I have appreciated is the community LSA has provided me. As someone who had long felt like an outsider, barely at the margins of my scholarly fields of law (my primary discipline at the time) and anthropology (the secondary discipline in which I was training), LSA introduced me to the people whose scholarship I was increasingly immersed in at the outset of my sociolegal research career.

Most importantly, the meeting brought me into contact with South African law and society scholars whose work was (regrettably) all but entirely invisible to me as someone studying in the Global North. The experience was so life-giving that I joined and never looked back (only the childbearing years have been enough to keep me from attending the LSA annual meeting; all my babies were well-timed for the academic calendar, but that meant they clashed with LSA).

Since then, I have received invaluable mentorship through the Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop, as well as the Collaborative Research Networks I engaged with, especially CRN 13: African Law and Society. I have also valued the many opportunities to turn around and give back through service in those same spaces.

Rather than having a disciplinary identity, I think of myself as a law and society/sociolegal scholar first. I consider the LSA my primary academic home.

Why should professionals or students join LSA?

Part of what makes LSA so great is its “big tent” nature, which makes it easy for people to find their sub-communities within it. This is especially true for scholars whose interests straddle numerous intersections. LSA has also created spaces, such as the Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop(s), that can serve as on-ramps for finding and plugging into networks. I continue to cross paths with some of the folx I met at the GSW (2008) and ECW (2013) in and through project collaborations and committees many years later. Indeed, many exciting projects in which I am involved came together via an LSA connection.

I have also found the people within LSA to be very generous with their mentorship. Whenever I have needed career advice or reference letters, there has always been a group of LSA mentors for me to reach out to. These people have been faithful supporters of my career and personal well-being as I navigate academia transnationally.

LSA’s investment in expanding access and amplifying the voices of scholars located in under-resourced parts of the Global South is really important because it simultaneously redistributes resources and helps create more equitable epistemic relationships. Its dedication to periodic global meetings and support of the International Research Collaborations has contributed to meaningful international conversations, exchanges, and partnerships that are enriching the broadening the body of knowledge that we think of as the sociolegal studies canon.

Submitting papers for the LSA Annual Meeting is also much less intimidating that it can be for other associations. LSA takes a deliberately generous and inclusive posture toward proposers; the recent move toward multilingualism by permitting paper panels in Portuguese at the meeting in Lisbon is an example of the association’s commitment to expanding access and inclusivity.

In that vein, one of the more recent LSA changes that I have greatly appreciated (even though I have not accessed it myself) is the fact that childcare grants are now made available for people to apply if they need them, which increases the ability of junior scholars, especially, to participate in meetings.

There are many reasons for professionals and students to join LSA; these are merely a sampling.

Learn more about Sindiso MnisiWeeks, her many publications, media appearances, awards, and involvement with academic organizations by viewing her website here.

It’s hard to imagine that the concept of bureaucracies—formed to represent states, rather than people or political parties–could trigger the development of new friendships. But when Professors Karina Ansolabehere (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and Leticia Barrera (Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) met postdoctoral fellow Javiera Araya-Moreno (Université de Sherbrooke) at LSA’s 2022 Annual Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, Portugal, that is exactly what happened.

“We realized that we had the same interests,” Professor Barrera explains. “Then we realized, why don’t we put something together? Because we’ve been working at different moments, on different panels, at different conferences.”

The three scholars share an understanding of bureaucracies as deeply human—created by people, and administered by people, to address the needs of people on a mass collective scale. While preconceived notions of bureaucracies as neutral, hierarchical, highly specialized, rule-obsessed bastions of stability are useful to understand, they also threaten to obscure more complicated realities. Drawing upon their different disciplinary backgrounds, a blend of law, anthropology, sociology, and political science, the scholars had each been separately engaged in figuring out what a state’s daily operations could teach them about the nature of law itself—what law is, in a practical sense, rather than what it does, or what it should do.

Of particular interest to them was bureaucracy in Latin America, where each of them were born. Professor Barrera grew up in Argentina, where she is currently based. Professor Ansolabehere was born in Argentina before moving to her current home in Mexico City, while Dr. Araya-Moreno grew up in Chile before moving to Montreal later in life. A collaborative project was the obvious next step.

“The idea came from having dinner or beers or coffee…after the conference,” Dr. Araya-Moreno reminisced. “We started to develop this friendship—I think that friendship is also an important part of the work—with other colleagues. And at some point, we said, ‘Oh, we should really work on something on the topic of bureaucracies in Latin America.’”

The 2024 LSA Programming Grant application offered the friends an opportunity to formalize their collaboration as a two-year seminar program, “Methodological Challenges for Studying Legal Bureaucracies in Latin America.” The primary goal of the program, which is currently underway, is to develop methodological strategies for studying bureaucracies through two channels—a workshop series for a small, interdisciplinary cohort of researchers, and a virtual lecture series intended to educate a larger international community. Crucially, however, it also provides an excuse for the three researchers to continue fostering their personal and intellectual relationships across geographic and disciplinary borders.

“There’s a very vibrant Latin American scholarly community that attends Law and Society and participates very actively,” explains Professor Barrera. However, there is no equivalent formalized law and society organization in Latin America; rather, scholars rely on an informal network of personal and professional connections.

Perhaps relatedly, much of the currently available research on Latin American bureaucracies adopts a Global North perspective. Latin America’s contemporary history, along with a glut of research focused specifically on criminal bureaucracy, obscures the practical, culturally situated realities of how bureaucracies in Latin America actually function on a daily basis. To address this gap, the collaboration has taken inspiration from similar work done in various Global South regions, particularly in India and South Africa, which focus on ground-level interactions between individuals and bureaucratic agencies.

“We want bureaucracies. It’s not a criticism of bureaucracies in themselves, but a project of getting to know better how they work,” Dr. Araya-Moreno explains. “We want to be against this way of seeing bureaucracies from the North by recognizing the specificities of how they work in practice instead of how they should or should not work.”

“The works of bureaucracy can tell us how people in their countries imagine or come up with ideas of the state,” explains Professor Barrera, referencing the unique social imaginaries that contextualize bureaucracies in different regions. Bureaucratic interactions carry a lot of information about the social norms, values, and priorities of a particular region. Culturally situated approaches to the study of bureaucracy, therefore, can serve to deepen our knowledge by identifying elements that are shaped by culture versus those that transcend culture.

Professor Ansolabehere has already encountered data in her own research that contradicts common misconceptions about bureaucracy, particularly how it operates in the Global North compared to the Global South.

“I’m doing a visiting scholarship in Montreal,” she explains.  “I’m conducting a research case study about the missing and murdered women and the national inquiry that Canada organized. And one of my main preliminary findings are that these kinds of interactions that I was mentioning are so much more similar than we thought. For good and for bad.”

Professor Barrera’s research has led to similarly counterintuitive findings, specifically regarding the presence of affect—both emotions and human connections—within bureaucratic interactions that may extend beyond the institution’s formal setting.

“Bureaucracy can be a surprise. The institution has a surprising way of handling some particular issues because they can also be places of resistance and even activism, like agencies or offices of public defense.”

“For example, you work with the prosecutor, and your family has disappeared,” Professor Ansolabehere elaborates, referencing her research on disappearances in Mexico. “So you have a strong relationship where you establish emotions and affections, but from both sides—from the family to the bureaucrat, but also from the bureaucrat to the family.”

These lines of inquiry are further complicated by the ways that different bureaucratic systems within a culture interact with one another—and how such power struggles impact individuals.

“All the time, new bureaucracies are being created,” Professor Ansolabehere explains, “and they live together with other bureaucracies, and there are a lot of clashes and tensions and complexities. So these kinds of power relationships are so much more complex, or more ingrained in daily life.”

Professor Ansolabehere, Professor Barrera, and Dr. Araya-Moreno have invited eleven additional researchers with compatible projects to explore these and related topics through the workshop portion of their program:

Adina Radosh (University of Toronto, Canada)

Loreto Quiroz (Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile)

Esteban Salmón (Stanford University, US)

Erika Bárcena (UNAM, Mexico)

Sergio Latorre (Universidad del Norte, Colombia)

Adriana Romero (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)

Rebecca Lemos (University of Brasilia, Brazil)

Santiago Amietta (Keele University, UK)

Diego Rochow (University of California, Irvine, US)

Lucero Ibarra (CIDE, Mexico)

Ignacio Riquelme (Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile)

All of the scholars primarily conduct qualitative empirical research, and most of them completed their undergraduate studies in Latin America. Despite their personal understanding of various Latin American cultures and realities, however, the participants are still encouraged to identify potential normative assumptions in their proposals, as well as strategies for moving beyond them.

Although everyone will be working on individual papers, the sessions will have a more collaborative spirit, with individuals sharing feedback and ideas based on their own areas of expertise. At the end of the program, each participant will have a manuscript ready for publication; collectively, they will have established the foundation for a potential new LSA Collaborative Research Network on Judicial Bureaucracies.

The virtual public lecture component of the program features noted leading scholars such as Mariana Valverde (University of Toronto), Yael Navarro (University of Cambridge), and Nayanika Mathur (University of Oxford). Future lectures will also include speakers based in Latin America. They have already attracted attendees from Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and various countries in Latin America. Each lecture is formatted slightly differently, with some speakers opting for a more dialectic approach versus a traditional one, but all of them are available in both English and Spanish via simultaneous translations. All students and professionals interested in the relationship between law and sociology, politics, and anthropology are encouraged to attend; indeed, several criminologists have joined, displaying a willingness to challenge their typically normative approach to understanding bureaucracies.

For the three scholars, the excitement of this project is palpable—as is the connection they have formed throughout the process.

“We are using and taking inspiration from other disciplines to create a truly sociolegal way of approaching bureaucracies,” says Dr. Araya-Moreno.

Details for the next “Methodological Challenges for Studying Bureaucracies in Latin America” lecture installment are coming soon. It will be announced in our LSA member newsletter, on our website, and on Twitter and Bluesky.

CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope. 

For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 42: Law and Emotion.

The institution of law is commonly understood to be governed by logic and reason, immune to the effects of more unpredictable forces like emotion. In fact, for many, law’s seemingly impersonal nature is what lends it an air of authority and legitimacy.

Dr. Renata Grossi (University of Technology Sydney), however, challenges that perception.

“In my first job as a tutor in an Australian university, I overheard some colleagues discuss what law was and one of them said something like ‘law is about everything … except maybe love,’” she recalls. “I remember immediately thinking how wrong that was.”

This conversation catalyzed Grossi’s interest in the relationship between romantic love and legal discourse—and eventually, the broader role that emotions play in shaping our understanding of legal concepts such as objectivity.

“The dominant view is that emotion is contrary to how we understand law and its work. This stems from the view we have of emotion as being the opposite of, and a disruptor to, reason,” she explains.

Grossi isn’t the only academic decrying the exclusion of emotion from legal scholarship and discourse. Along with Dr. Shailesh Kumar (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Professor Sharyn Roach Anleu (Flinders University), she leads a Collaborative Research Network, CRN 42: Law and Emotion, through the Law and Society Association. The interdisciplinary group, which boasts a membership of approximately 130 members from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Sweden, has connected over their shared interest in exploring, rather than suppressing, the role that human emotions, in all of their messiness, play in understanding, interacting with, and administering law.

These scholars draw on a wide range of disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. “In practice, being transparent about the role of emotion enables us to better understand, apply, and change law,” says Grossi. “The claim that emotion matters is also important politically and epistemologically.”

Grossi first encountered CRN 42 as her scholarly focus deepened. When she learned that many leading law and emotion scholars, like Kathryn Abrams (University of California, Berkeley) and Hila Keren (Southwestern Law School), were involved in the network, she decided to join. “I thought that it would be a wonderful way to develop my own thoughts of where my work ‘belonged’ and why it mattered,” she explained.

CRN 42’s sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting allowed her to do just that, and they continue to galvanize academic and career development for scholars at all stages of their careers. Each year, members gather to analyze the latest developments in law and emotion scholarship, engage in stimulating conversations about one another’s work, and leave with the intellectual tools, scholarly networks, and enthusiasm to advance their research. The Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (published in 2020), developed by CRN 42 members Susan Bandes (DePaul University), Jody Lynn Madeira (Indiana University), Kathryn Temple (Georgetown University), and Emily Kidd (York University), has its roots in this enriching environment.

At the 2024 LSA Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CRN 42 held the following panels and roundtables:

• Emotions in/and International Law

• Demeanor Evidence: A Mainstay of the Common Law System, a Window Into the Soul, or a Portal to Prejudice?

• Discourses of Crime and Law in the Global North and South

• How to Account for Trauma and Emotion in Legal Teaching: Practice, Pedagogy, and Unsettling Conversations

• Emotional and Legal Embodiments: The School, the Market, the Archive, and Indigenous Geographies

• New Methodological Approaches to Advance and Challenge Longstanding Theories
  Judging and Emotions

• Experiencing Law’s Emotions Through Bodies and Stories

CRN 42 doesn’t just benefit its members, but regularly hold events outside of the LSA Annual Meeting that are open to scholars from all disciplines, free of charge. For instance, on October 29^th, Naama Goldberg (Tel Aviv University) will be hosting a virtual seminar on “Remorse, Sentencing, and Goals of Criminal Punishment.” On December 5^th, Eve Hanan (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) will host a virtual seminar on “Acting Guilty: Emotions as a Substitute for Proof in Pregnancy Crimes.”*

Many Law and Emotion members are also involved in other CRNs through LSA, serving the dual purpose of infusing law and emotion ideas into various sociolegal conversations while also bringing diverse insights from other fields into their law and emotion research. Members also share their ideas with new audiences whenever possible; recently, Grossi and Professor Bandes wrote blog pieces relating emotion to Western legal theory and the death penalty, respectively, for the National Law School of India’s Socio-Legal Review.

“We are keen to spread the word on the importance of emotion in law, and the creation of knowledge,” says Grossi.

Though busy, CRN 42 shows no signs of slowing down. At the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting in Chicago, the group plans to hold formal incubator sessions and lay the groundwork for more specialized research projects. If Grossi has anything to say about it, these tireless efforts will add much-needed dimension to the broader law and society conversation.

“In general, we would like to invite everyone to (at least temporarily) think about their work within the paradigm of emotion,” she says. “Even when researchers don’t see themselves as law and emotion scholars, this can be a fruitful enquiry which can lead to some interesting insights.”

*Readers interested in attending these seminars can email Dr. Renata Grossi at renata.grossi@uts.edu.au for a Zoom meeting link.