AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Affiliated Research Professor
- Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at UCI Law School
Bryant Garth is a Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at UCI Law School, where he codirects the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession. He also served as UCI Law School's Interim Dea n for the 2021-22 academic year. Previously, Garth served as Interim Executive Director of the ABF from 2022 to 2023, Dean of Southwestern Law School from 2005 until 2012, Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation from 1990 to 2004, and Dean of the Indiana University-Bloomington School of Law from 1986 to 1990.
Garth's scholarship focuses on the legal profession, the sociology of law, and globalization. Two of his books coauthored with Yves Dezalay, Dealing in Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Asian Legal Revivals (University of Chicago Press, 2010), were awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association for the best books in the field of Law and Society published that year. He also served as coeditor of the Journal of Legal Education from 2011 to 2014.
Garth is on the Executive Coordinating Committee of the American Bar Foundation's After the J.D. project, the first longitudinal study of the legal profession, and chairs the advisory committee of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE).
Job Titles:
- Immediate past Chair of the Fellows
Job Titles:
- Research Professor at the ABF
Elizabeth Mertz is a Research Professor at the ABF and the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a leading legal anthropologist and pioneer in the study of legal language in the United States, with a special focus on law school education. Mertz's research has also played a major role in developing interdisciplinary approaches to the empirical study of law within the field of New Legal Realism.
Mertz has been widely recognized for her scholarship. In 2021, she won two awards from the Law & Society Association: the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize and the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award for her research in law and society and her commitment to junior scholars and legal education. She was also elected a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, as well as Treasurer of the Law & Society Association.
Her book The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think Like a Lawyer" (Oxford University Press, 2007) was an important source for the Carnegie Report on legal education and won the Herbert Jacob Book Prize. She has co-edited multiple volumes, including Translating the Social World for Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), The New Legal Realism: Translating Law-and-Society for Today's Legal Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and the Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism (Edward Elgar, 2021). Her articles have been widely circulated in publications such as the Journal of Legal Education, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Harvard Law Review, U.C. Irvine Law Review, and Law & Social Inquiry.
Job Titles:
- ABF Researcher
- Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto
Ellen Berrey is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation. She has previously been on the faculties of the University at Buffalo, SUNY and the University of Denver. Her research brings insights of cultural sociology to the study of inequality, race, law, and organizations. How do organizations interpret and implement policies aimed at correcting inequalities, such as affirmative action? How do they navigate legal constraints and political opposition? How do they mobilize cultural ideals, such as diversity and fairness, to support their objectives? She approaches these topics from an interpretive perspective, using ethnography and mixed methods to understand how people make meaning in politics and social life. Her work to date is divided into three major streams: the symbolic politics of diversity, employment discrimination law, and decision-making and race in college admissions. She is launching a new project on entrepreneurialism and the politics of sustainability. Her first book is The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. Her book, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality, is co-authored with ABF Research Professors Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen.
Job Titles:
- of Counsel, Kirkland & Ellis
Job Titles:
- Research Social Scientist
Job Titles:
- Treasurer, American Bar Association
Job Titles:
- Chairman - Elect of the Fellows
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- Dean, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law / Northwestern University
Job Titles:
- Law and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University
Education
J.D., University of Chicago Law School
Ph.D., Northwestern University
M.A., Northwestern University
B.A., University of Michigan
Job Titles:
- Affiliated Research Professor
- Columnist for Forbes
- Economist
Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. They are the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale's School of Management.
Professor Ayres has been a columnist for Forbes magazine, a commentator on public radio's Marketplace, and a contributor to the New York Times' Freakonomics Blog. Their research has been featured on PrimeTime Live, Oprah and Good Morning America and in Time and Vogue magazines. Ayres is a co-founder of stickK.com, a web site that helps you stick to your goals. In an Illinois post-conviction proceeding, Ayres helped convince a court to vacate their client's death sentence.
In 2020, Harvard University Press published Ayres's twelfth book, Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights (with Fredrick Vars). Ayres has also published over 100 articles on a wide range of topics including several empirical studies.
In 2006, they were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ayres's book with Greg Klass, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent, won the 2006 Scribes book award "for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year." Ayres has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most-cited law professors of their generation. (See James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculties, 71 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 781 (1996); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 409 (2000).) The Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Ayres as "a law-and-economics guru."
Ayres was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, received their B.A. (majoring in Russian studies and economics) and J.D. from Yale and their Ph.D in economics from M.I.T. Ayres clerked for the Honorable James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. They have previously taught at Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford and Virginia law schools and has been a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation and Columbia. From 2002 to 2009, Ayres was the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
Jacob Goldin is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and the Richard M. Lipton Professor of Tax Law at the University of Chicago Law School. His research focuses on how U.S. tax policy affects low-income households. His research interests also include health policy, tax administration, and the application of behavioral economics to policy design.
Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School, Goldin was a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He has also worked in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Goldin's work has been published in journals in both law and economics, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Yale Law Journal, and National Tax Journal. In 2022, he was awarded the National Institute of Health Care Management Research Award for "Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach."
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board Officers Team
- President / Director, Crowe & Dunlevy / Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Job Titles:
- Bessemer Trust / Palm Beach, Florida
Job Titles:
- Affiliated Research Professor
John Donohue III is an Affiliated Research Professor of the American Bar Foundation and the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.
Donohue has been one of the leading empirical researchers in the legal academy over the past thirty years. Donohue is an economist and lawyer well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas, including civil rights and antidiscrimination law, employment discrimination, criminal justice and the death penalty, and factors influencing crime, such as guns, incarceration, policing, and legalized abortion.
Before rejoining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2010 (where he had previously taught from 1995 to 2004), Donohue was the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He recently coauthored Employment Discrimination: Law and Theory with George Rutherglen. Earlier in his career, he was a law professor at Northwestern University and a Research Fellow with the American Bar Foundation. Additionally, he clerked with Chief Judge T. Emmet Clarie, of the U.S. District Court of Hartford, Connecticut. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the former Editor of the American Law and Economics Review and President of the American Law and Economics Association.
Laura Beth Nielsen is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, a Professor of Sociology, and the Director of the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley Law School for the 2023-24 academic year.
Nielsen's research focuses on law's capacity for social change. Her primary field is the sociology of law, with particular interests in legal consciousness (how ordinary people understand the law) and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Her most recent monograph, Rights on Trial: How Employment Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (University of Chicago Press 2017) with Ellen Berrey and Robert L. Nelson. Her first monograph, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech, (Princeton University Press, 2004) studies racist and sexist street speech, targets' reactions and responses to it, and attitudes about using law to deal with such speech.
Nielsen is the author of numerous articles published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, UCLA Law Review, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, Stanford Journal of Law and Policy, and the Wisconsin Law Review. Her work and commentary have appeared in major media outlets, such as New York Times, Time Magazine, and USA Today. She has appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News, and Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell. She is also the recipient of grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Fellows / Hahn & Hahn LLP / Pasadena, California
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
Education
Ph.D., Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley
J.D., University of California, Berkeley School of Law
B.A., Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Job Titles:
- Research Professor / Executive Director
Job Titles:
- President / Lansing, Illinois
Job Titles:
- Research Social Scientist
Job Titles:
- Communications Manager
- Staff
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board Officers Team
- Treasurer
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Research Director at the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab
Nour J. Abdul-Razzak is a Research Director at the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab and holds a joint appointment as a Research Associate with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Prior to joining the Inclusive Economy Lab and the Harris School, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab.
She is an applied microeconomist whose research addresses the structural foundations of law and inequality. At the Inclusive Economy Lab, she directs research projects related to guaranteed income, legal support for youth at risk of incarceration, and homelessness prevention. She also has ongoing projects focusing on the criminal justice system, with research exploring the role of police discretion and measurements of crime, interventions that reduce criminal justice involvement and violence exposure among youth, and the impact of free prison communication technology.
Her research has been published in Electoral Studies and mentioned in major publications, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
Job Titles:
- Chairman, ABA House of Delegates / Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC / Lexington, Kentucky
Job Titles:
- Designing Just Solutions at Scale: Lawyerless Legal Services and Evidence - Based Regulation / September 2022
Job Titles:
- Professor of Tax Law at University of Chicago Law School
Job Titles:
- Director Emeritus
- Research Professor
Robert L. Nelson is the Director Emeritus and the MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the American Bar Foundation, as well as Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University.
Nelson is a leading scholar in the fields of the legal profession and discrimination law. At the ABF, he has founded multiple projects centered on these research interests: After the JD, Future of Latinos in the United States, World Justice Project, and Changing Dynamics of Employment Discrimination.
He has authored or edited ten books, including Diversity in Practice: Race, Gender, and Class in Legal and Professional Careers (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and most recently The Making of Lawyers' Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (forthcoming in 2023, University of Chicago Press, w. Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant Garth, Joyce Sterling, David Wilkins, Meghan Dawe, and Ethan Michelson. He has also written multiple articles for publication.
Job Titles:
- Staff / Development Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto
Ronit Dinovitzer is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she co-directs the Research Group on Legal Diversity. She is also Affiliated Faculty in Harvard's Center on the Legal Profession. She has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ronit recently delivered the Annual Lecture on the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, focusing on issues of diversity and inequality in the legal profession. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board Officers Team
- Vice President / Santa Barbara, California
Shari Seidman Diamond is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and the Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker Law School. An attorney and social psychologist, she is one of the foremost empirical researchers on jury process and legal decision making, including the use of science by the courts. She has authored or coauthored more than 150 publications in law reviews and behavioral science journals, including the Reference Guide on Survey Research in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (4th ed. in press) and The Multiple Dimensions of Trial by Jury: Studies of Jury Behavior (2016, in Spanish), and is completing a book on juries based on a field experiment in which cameras recorded real jury deliberations.
Diamond practiced law at Sidley Austin in the areas of Litigation and Intellectual Property. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of Illinois Chicago; served as editor of the Law and Society Review and was president of the American Psychology-Law Society. She has served as an expert witness in American and Canadian courts on matters concerning juries, trademarks, and deceptive advertising, and her publications on juries and surveys have been cited by federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Diamond received the 2010 Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Award from the Law and Society Association and the 1991 American Psychological Association award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy. As a member of the ABA's American Jury Project, she helped draft the Principles for Juries and Jury Trials adopted in 2005. She currently serves on the Seventh Circuit Committee on Pattern Criminal Jury Instructions and is a special advisor to the ABA Jury Commission. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
Job Titles:
- Research Professor Emeritus
Stephen Daniels is a Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation. He has published extensively on a broad range of topics that include innovation in legal education, the delivery of legal services, civil juries, trial courts, plaintiffs' lawyers, medical malpractice, punitive damages, and the politics of civil justice reform. He has testified before congressional and state legislative committees about civil justice reform and served as an expert in cases dealing with constitutional challenges to civil justice reform.
Daniels is coauthor (with Joanne Martin) of Tort Reform, Plaintiff's Lawyers, and Access to Justice (University Press of Kansas, 2015). His work has also been featured in a multitude of journals, including Law & Society Review, Texas Law Review, DePaul Law Review, Journal of Legal Education, and International Journal of the Legal Profession.
Job Titles:
- Research Professor at the ABF
Tera Agyepong is a Research Professor at the ABF and an Associate Professor of Legal History and African American History at DePaul University, where she directs the Pre-Law Concentration and History of Law minor. She was awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences' first endowed professorship in 2016. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Agyepong's scholarly interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, history, and the law. She pays particular attention to how historical processes of constructing race and gender have shaped the evolution of criminal and juvenile justice laws.
Her book, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) won the 2018 Grace Abbo tt Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth.
Her work has also been featured in book chapters and publications, including Northwestern Journal of Human Rights, Journal of African American History, and Gender and History.
Tom Ginsburg is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, where he also holds an appointment in the Political Science Department. He currently codirects the Comparative Constitutions Project, a National Science Foundation- funded data set cataloging the world's constitutions since 1789.
His latest book is Democracies and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Earlier books include Judicial Review in New Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; Judicial Reputation (The University of Chicago Press, 2015); and How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2018), with coauthor Aziz Z. Huq, winner of the best book prize from the International Society for Constitutional Law. He has edited or coedited twenty-five other books.
He has served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, Kyushu University, Seoul National University, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Trento. Before teaching, he served as a legal advisor at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands, and he has consulted with numerous international development agencies and governments on legal and constitutional reform.
Traci Burch is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.
She is the author of Trading Democracy for Justice: Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and coauthor of Creating a New Racial Order (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board Officers Team
Job Titles:
- Research Chair in Diversity and Law
Job Titles:
- President - Elect, American Bar Association / Thompson Coburn LLP / St. Louis, MO