LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Sociology
Amada Armenta is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines the connections between the immigration enforcement system and the criminal justice system, and the implications of this connection for immigrants, bureaucracies, and cities.
Her book, "Protect Serve and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement" (University of California Press, 2017), was recognized as a C. Wright Mills Book Award Finalist (2017), Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob Book Prize Honorable Mention (2018), American Sociological Association Latina/o Sociology Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award co-winner (2019), and American Sociological Association Sociology of Law Section's Distinguished Book Award (2019).
Currently, she is working on her second book project, an examination of the legal attitudes of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in Philadelphia.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo School of Law
Anya Bernstein is Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo School of Law. Starting in January 2023, she will be Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Her research focuses on the work and the social life of bureaucracies within democratic states, focusing in particular on the United States and Taiwan. She also writes about the semiotic techniques judges use to produce interpretations of legal texts. Her work uses ethnography, interview, and textual analysis to explore how judges and administrators legitimize their actions and imagine their government.
Anya holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and received a JD from Yale Law School, after which she clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi (Second Circuit Court of Appeals) and held a Bigelow Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Her research has been supported with National Science Foundation, Fulbright Hayes, Fulbright Scholar, and Blakemore Foundation awards, among others.
Anya was introduced to the LSA as a graduate student; it has been her intellectual home ever since. She received the Law & Social Inquiry graduate student essay prize in 2007. She has also served as the Chair of the Law & Anthropology section of the Association of American Law Schools and is a member of the Asian Law and Society Association.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University
Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification; race, ethnicity, and immigration; surveillance and social control; and health. Asad's current research agenda considers how institutional categories-in particular, citizenship and legal status-matter for multiple forms of inequality. His book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press) examines how and why undocumented immigrants worried about deportation nonetheless engage with institutions whose records the government can use to monitor them. Additional research projects focus on the effects of immigration enforcement on health, the role of the federal judiciary in immigration enforcement, and the capacity of immigrant-serving organizations to counter the inequalities of the U.S. immigration system.
Asad's research has been published in several outlets, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Law & Society Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science & Medicine, among other outlets. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Louis Wirth Award for Best Article given by the Section on International Migration, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Asad also serves on the advisory or editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Law & Society Review, New York University Press' series on Health, Society, and Inequality, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Asad was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University's Center for the Study of Inequality. He earned his A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, and his B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Wisconsin.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science
Professor Sarat has received numerous awards including LSA's Harry Kalven Award; the Stan Wheeler Prize for distinguished teaching and mentoring of undergraduate, graduate, or professional students; and the Ronald Pipkin Award, for distinguished service to the field of law and Society.
Professor Sarat founded Amherst College's Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought and The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He also has been president of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair ) University of Connecticut
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, an Inaugural Inclusive Excellence Term Chair Professor, and a Chancellor 's Fellow in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society
Bryan L. Sykes is an Associate Professor, an inaugural Inclusive Excellence Term Chair Professor, and a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society (and, by courtesy, Sociology and Public Health) at the University of California, Irvine. He is an Associate Editor for Science Advances (the Open Access version of Science magazine), an Academic Editor for the Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Perspectives.
Dr. Sykes received a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California-Berkeley and completed post-doctoral research at the University of Washington. His research focuses on demography and criminology, with particular interests in fertility, mortality, population health, mass incarceration, social inequality, and research methodology. Professor Sykes' work on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration has been published in leading social science and medical journals and law reviews. His estimates of racial disparities in incarceration were featured in the National Research Council's (2014) landmark report on The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, and he serves as a co-editor of a forthcoming double issue on monetary sanctions in RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. His current research project - Shadow Costs: The Effect of Economic and Informational Inequality on Court-Order Compliance - is funded by the Haynes Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Law & Science and Science of Broadening Participation programs of the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Sykes currently serves on the Law & Society Association's Graduate Student Workshop/Early Career Workshop Planning Committee.
Job Titles:
- COORDINATOR of GLOBAL ACTIVITIES
- Professor of Public Law and Interim NRF Chair in Security and Justice
Dee Smythe is a Professor of Public Law and Interim NRF Chair in Security and Justice in the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town.
From 2006 to 2012 she was Director of the Law, Race and Gender Unit, and from 2013-2015 the founding Director of the Centre for Law and Society. Between 2016-2018 she served as Deputy Dean for Research in the UCT Law Faculty. Prior to re-joining the Law Faculty in 2009, Dee was Principal Researcher at the Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit in UCT's Faculty of Health Sciences. Between 2009-2011, Dee co-convened the Stanford Law School International Human Rights Law Clinic with Kathleen Kelly Janus.
Dee's research spans a range of areas at the intersection of law, policy, and social justice. Her research is particularly concerned with understanding the operation of transitioning legal systems, ranging from legal education, through legal practice, and the operation of the police, prosecution and criminal courts, to vernacular dispute management mechanisms.
Dee has also written on HIV/AIDS, crime prevention, and police transformation, and is an expert on state responses to gender-based violence, with a specific focus on sexual offences. Her books include Rape Unresolved: Policing Sexual Offences in South Africa, Should we consent? The politics of rape law reform in South Africa(ed. with Lillian Artz), and the Sexual Offences Commentary (ed. with Bronwyn Pithey). Other edited volumes include, In Search of Equality: Women, Law & Society in Africa (with Steffi Rohrs) and Marriage, Land and Custom: Essays on Law and Social Change in South Africa (with Aninka Claassens). Dee's current research explores the regulation of hurt, harm and hate in written and spoken words, the intersections of administrative and criminal law in institutional responses to sexual harassment/violence; and the contours African law and society scholarship.
Dee was a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford Law School, where she received her masters and doctoral degrees. In 2009 she was awarded the UCT College of Fellows Young Researcher Award for outstanding scholarly work by a young academic. In the same year the work of the Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit was recognised with UCT's inaugural Distinguished Social Responsiveness Award. In 2011 the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit's Rural Women's Action Research Project also received the UCT Social Responsiveness Award. Dee has convened the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers' focus group on Women, Equality and Constitutionalism and served for many years as Deputy Chairperson of the Board of Rape Crisis.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law
I. India Thusi is a Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. Her research adopts an anthropological methodology and examines racial and sexual hierarchies as they relate to policing, criminalization, and human rights. Her articles and essays have been published in the Harvard Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, amongst others. Her book, Policing Bodies, was recently published by Stanford University Press and examines the policing of sex work in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kamari Maxine Clarke holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz (1997) and a Master in the Study of Law from Yale Law School (2002) and a BA from Concordia University (1988). She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto and the Interim Director of the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (CDTS). She holds joint faculty appointments at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, The Faculty of Law, and the Department of Anthropology. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the anthropology department with an affiliation at the Promise Institute for Human Rights.
For more than twenty years, she has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key academic contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union (AU) legal counsel and produced policy reports to help the AU navigate various international law and United Nations challenges. She has also served as associate editor for the American Anthropologist, the field's flagship journal and serves on a range of editorial and advisory boards.
Clarke has published nine books (3 monographs and 6 edited volumes) with over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), Fictions of Justice (Cambridge, 2010), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). Clarke is the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Book Prize, as well as the 2019 finalist for the Elliot Skinner book award for her latest book, Affective Justice (Duke, 2019). She is also a recipient of a Distinguished Chair in Transnational Justice sand Socio-legal Studies and a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the Daniel
Karin D. Martin is Associate Professor at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington, where she is also Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Sociology. She is a crime policy specialist whose areas of expertise are monetary sanctions, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and decision-making in the criminal legal context. In 2020, she received the University of Washington's highest teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Dr. Martin is an American Bar Foundation Affiliated Scholar and was a 2021-2022 ABF/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Faculty Scholar. She is also Affiliated Faculty with the West Coast Poverty Center and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.
In her current work, she examines how civil justice problems and criminal legal system involvement give rise to one another, including the intersections between amnesty for unpaid court-ordered debt, cyclical and protracted criminal legal system contact, housing security, and legal representation for eviction proceedings. In a related project, she is investigating ways to overcome the obstacles to eligible people voting while they are in jail.
Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and law reviews across disciplines, including: Stanford Law Review, Social Issues and Policy Review, Annual Review of Criminology, Sociological Perspectives, Law and Human Behavior, Law & Policy, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Journal of Urban Health, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, International Journal of Prisoner Health, Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School
Kathryne (Katie) Young is Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is an affiliated faculty member at the American Bar Foundation, where she was also an ABF/JPB Access to Justice Faculty Scholar in 2020-21. Prior to joining a law school, Katie was a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader in 2020 and won the Law and Society Association's Article Prize in 2015. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School.
In the Law & Society Association, Katie has served on the Board of Trustees and numerous committees. She also co-founded two Collaborative Research Networks (CRN 39: Everyday Legality and CRN 24: Law and Rurality). Currently, Katie is on the Editorial Board of Law & Society Review and American Sociological Review.
Katie is a sociologist and legal scholar whose work spans the civil and criminal justice systems, focusing on social mechanisms that maintain inequality. Her current project is a large, mixed-methods study at the intersection of access to justice and legal consciousness. Katie's scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Washington State Supreme Court, and appears in numerous journals, including Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Harvard Law Review, Social Forces, California Law Review, and many others. Her empirically-based book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018), was named one of Above the Law's Distinguished Dozen Legal Reads of the year and has been an Amazon Bestseller in Legal Education.
If you have ideas about improving LSA, want to learn how to get more involved, or want to talk about legal consciousness or access to justice, email Katie or visit her website.
Kevin joined the Law and Society Association in the fall of 2021. Before LSA, he was an Elementary Educator for 18 years teaching in St. Paul, Minnesota, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Amherst, MA and Takoma Park, Maryland with specialization in inclusive classroom design and technology in learning. A native of Oak Park, IL, he earned his bachelor's degree in English at Macalester College and his Master's in Elementary Education at the University of Michigan. He is an avid tennis fan and player as well as an appreciator of the arts. He is excited to provide support for the members of LSA and be part of its learning community.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Law
- Professor at Waseda Law School in Tokyo, Japan
Kyoko Ishida is a Professor at Waseda Law School in Tokyo, Japan, where she started her teaching career as an Assistant Professor in 2009. She holds LL.M (2003) and Ph.D. (2006) degrees from the University of Washington School of Law.
Her research interests include the professional responsibility of lawyers, gender in law, and access to justice. Her publications include: Japanese Lawyers' Ethics in the News Era (with Masahiko Takanaka, Yuhikaku, 2020); Unpopular or Unfamiliar Dispute Resolution? How Japanese People View ADR (Asian Pacific Mediation Journal Vol.1, 2019); Why Does Surname Matter? Past, Present, and Future Prospect of Family Law from a Gender Perspective in Japan, (Journal of Korean Law Vol.18, 2018); Deterioration or refinement? Impacts of an increasing number of lawyers on the lawyer discipline system in Japan (International Journal of the Legal Profession Vol.24, 2017); and Ethics and Regulations of Legal Services Providers in Japan (VDM Publishing, 2011). She has collaborated empirical research with the Japan Federation of Bar Associations on citizens' access to lawyers since 2017. She is currently a member of the Science Council of Japan, while serving as the Associate Secretary General of the Asian Law and Society Association and a board member of the Japan Association of Sociology of Law.
Job Titles:
- Chairman & Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation
Laura Beth Nielsen is Chair & Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. A graduate of UC Berkeley's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Berkeley Law (Ph.D. 1999; J.D. 1996), she was Director of Legal Studies at Northwestern from 2006 to 2020.
The Law and Society Association is LB's primary intellectual home; she served as Secretary of the Association (2011-13); Board of Trustee Member (2001-04); Program Committee Chair (2004); Co-chair of the Graduate Student Workshop (2010 & 2013); Program Committee (2003), and Jacob Prize Chair (2020 & 2017).
Laura Beth was co-PI on the ABF/LSA/NSF doctoral fellowship program in law and inequality, which supported 20 Grad students from 2008-16. In 2018 she won LSA's Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award. Her scholarship earned the Association's Grad Student Paper Prize (1999); Dissertation Prize (2000); and Article Prize (2002).
LB's research interests are in law's capacity for social change. She studies legal consciousness and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality, (U Chicago Press, 2017) examines the system of employment civil rights litigation in the United States. Her first monograph, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech, (Princeton U Press, 2004) studies racist and sexist street speech and attitudes about using law to deal with such speech. She's participated in Congressional briefings about federal hate crime legislation and speech's role in hate crime.
She's edited 3 books and publishes in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, and leading law reviews. She's received grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation.
Liz Chiarello is an associate professor of sociology at Saint Louis University where she conducts research at the intersections of medical sociology, socio-legal scholarship, and organizational theory. She spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is currently working on two primary research projects: the first examines institutional influences on pharmacists' ethical decision-making, and the second examines the contemporary U.S. opioid crisis as a case for understanding how two fields-healthcare and criminal justice-address the same social problem. This study examines institutional collaboration and conflict between criminal justice and healthcare workers, technological influences on frontline work, and implications for inequality in patients' access to care and exposure to the criminal justice system. She teaches several courses including Medical Sociology, Law and Society, Drugs and Society, and Introduction to Sociology. Her first book, Policing Patients, is currently under contract at Princeton University Press. Her work has appeared in sociology and socio-legal journals as well as popular media including op-eds, and podcasts. She is a frequent public commentator on opioid-related topics and has been featured in USA Today, Bloomberg News, and St. Louis on the Air (an NPR affiliate).
Job Titles:
- ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR of OPERATIONS
Melissa joined LSA as Associate Director of Operations. Before LSA, Melissa managed a long-standing, local ice cream manufacturing and distribution company, which included organizing events and overseeing daily operations. She previously held roles in the arts managing performances and educational programs. She holds an MM in music theory and cognition from Northwestern University. She is the Organizing Committee Chair for UMass-Amherst Professional Staff Union, volunteers for lasagnalove.org, and sings in a band of mostly original music that performs in the Pioneer Valley. She is thrilled at the opportunity to work at LSA and facilitate law and society scholarship.
Job Titles:
- PRESIDENT
- Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center
Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the Faculty Co-Director of the O'Neill Institute. Michele is the 2023 recipient of the California Women's Law Center's Pursuit of Justice Award. She is also 2022 recipient of the Margaret Brent Award from the American Bar Association (ABA). As a Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine, she received the Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the Hastings Center.
Michele earned her Master of Laws (LL.M.) and Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) from the University of Wisconsin and Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Boston College Law School.
Michele served as Co-Chair of the LSA Program Committee for the 2022 Annual Meeting (Lisbon, Portugal). She previously served as a member of the Board of Trustees (2013-15); on the Editorial Board of Law and Social Inquiry (2011-2013); Faculty for the Law and Society Summer Institute (Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006); and Founded the CRN on Biotechnology and Bioethics. In 2002-03, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley.
Michele has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, focusing on human trafficking (marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics). Her books include the award-winning, Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (2020); Biotechnology, Bioethics, and The Law (2015); Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010); and Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006).
Her scholarship appears in the California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, among others. Michele's public commentaries can be found in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, Politico, Ms. Magazine, and the Nation, among others. She has been called to testify before Congress and state legislatures based on her extensive research.
Job Titles:
- TREASURER
- ABF Director Emeritus and MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession
- Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University
Robert L. Nelson is Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and the MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the American Bar Foundation (where he was Director 2004-2015). He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in sociology, both from Northwestern, and has held several positions of academic leadership. He is a leading scholar in the fields of the legal profession and discrimination law. He has authored or edited 11 books and numerous articles, including Legalizing Gender Inequality, Cambridge University Press 1999, which won the prize for best book in sociology in 2001, Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar, University of Chicago Press 2005, and Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality, University of Chicago Press 2017. His has a forthcoming book, The Making of Lawyers' Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, University of Chicago Press.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Purdue University
Robin Stryker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Previously she was Professor in the School of Sociology, Rogers College of Law (by courtesy) and the School of Government and Public Policy (by courtesy) at the University of Arizona. Before that she held positions at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. She has held visiting positions at EHESS and Science-Po LIEPP in Paris, France. Throughout her career, she has received multiple teaching and mentoring awards, and she has received numerous scholarly awards for her research, including a Jean Monnet Fellowship in 2001, A Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and a Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Fellowship at Stanford University in 2016. Her research lies at the intersection of law, politics, and inequality, and includes work on law and markets, civil rights, international human rights, law and legitimacy, law and social change, and legal consciousness. Among her recent publications are "From Legal Doctrine to Social Transformation? Comparing US Voting Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity and Fair Housing Legislation, American Journal of Sociolog y (2017, with Nicholas Pedriana) which won Distinguished Article awards from the American Sociological Association's Political Sociology and Human Rights Section s, and Closing the Rights Gap: From Human Rights to Social Transformation, University of California Press (2015, co-edited with LaDawn Haglund). She is completing a book on the politics of social and behavior al science in US employment discrimination law. She has been active in numerous professional associations, including the American Sociological Association, where she has been an elected member of the ASA Council and the elected chair of three sections: Theory, Sociology of Law and Political Sociology. She has been elected President of the international Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), and she has served on the National Science Foundation's Law & Social Science Review Panel.
Sahar Aziz is Professor of Law, Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar, and Middle Eastand Legal Studies Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Professor Aziz'sscholarship adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine intersections of nationalsecurity, race, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national securitylaws and policies on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the U.S. ProfessorAziz's groundbreaking book The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes ReligiousFreedom examines how religious bigotry racializes immigrant Muslims through ahistorical and comparative approach. Her research also investigates the relationship between authoritarianism, terrorism,and rule of law in the Middle East. She is the founding director of theinterdisciplinary Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights and a faculty affiliateof the African American Studies Department at Rutgers University-Newark ProfessorAziz serves on the Rutgers-Newark Chancellor's Commission on Diversity andTransformation as well as the editorial board of the Arab Law Quarterly and theInternational Journal of Middle East Studies. Professor Aziz teaches courses onnational security, critical race theory, Islamophobia, evidence, torts, and Middle Eastlaw.
Professor Aziz is the recipient of numerous awards including a Soros EqualityFellowship (2021), A New America Middle Eastern and North African AmericanNational Security and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader (2020), the ResearchMaking an Impact Award by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding(2017), the Derrick Bell Award from the American Association of Law SchoolsMinority Section (2015), and an Emerging Scholar by Diverse Issues in HigherEducation (2015). Professor Aziz's commentary has appeared in the New York Times, CNN.com,Carnegie Endowment's Sada Journal, Middle East Institute, Foxnews.com, WorldPolitics Review, Houston Chronicle, Austin Statesmen, The Guardian, and ChristianScience Monitor. She is a frequent public speaker and has appeared on CNN, BBCWorld, PBS, CSPAN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Al Jazeera English.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University
Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. In her research, Brayne uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the social consequences of data-intensive surveillance practices. Her book, "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing" (Oxford University Press), draws on ethnographic research with a large, urban police department to understand how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies.
In previous research, she analyzed the relationship between criminal justice contact and involvement in medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions. Brayne's research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society of Criminology.
Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, Brayne was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University. Brayne has volunteer-taught college-credit sociology classes in prisons since 2012. In 2017, she founded the Texas Prison Education Initiative.
Job Titles:
- Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics Professor of Law
Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal mobilization, and access to justice. He is founding director of the Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which advances empirical study of lawyers, and served as Director of the Program on Public Interest Law & Policy. Cummings is a 2021 Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a 2022 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute in Florence. His recent work includes "Lawyers and Movements: Legal Mobilization in Transformative Times" (Oxford 2022), "An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles" (Oxford 2021), and "Global Pro Bono: Causes, Consequences, and Contestation" (with Silva and Trubek) (Cambridge Law & Society Series 2021).
Cummings is on the editorial board of Law & Social Inquiry, has won NSF grants for his study of Public Interest Lawyers in a Time of Crisis (with Abel and Albiston) and Global Pro Bono, and has received multiple LSA International Research Collaborative grants to promote mentoring and inter-cultural exchange around public interest lawyering. Cummings is a committed LSA member, participating in every meeting since he started teaching in 2002, and has played significant leadership roles, serving as co-chair of the CRN Committee, chair of the Jacob Prize Committee, and as a member of other committees including the Wheeler Mentorship Prize Committee, International Scholarship Committee, and Program Committee.
Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She also holds a co-appointment with the Brooks School of Public Policy, and is co-director of the Cornell Migrations Initiative. Gleeson earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously on the faculty of the Latin American & Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her recent books include Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power (with Xóchitl Bada, University of California Press, 2023) and Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States (University of California Press, 2016). With Els de Graauw, she has also examined the implementation of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the challenges of coalition building and local governance. She is currently working on a book manuscript with coauthors, entitled Status at Work: Power, Race, and the Law in the Immigrant Workplace.
Boutcher, Steven A. 2016. "The Growth of Large Law Firm Pro Bono Programs." In Beyond Elite Law: Access to Civil Justice for Americans of Average Means, edited by Samuel Estreicher and Joy Radice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Steven Boutcher is Executive Officer of the Law and Society Association and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research. Before coming to LSA, Steve was a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law Center, an assistant professor of sociology and public policy at UMass, and most recently, the Executive Director of the Center for Employment Equity at UMass. Steve received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine in 2010. Steve's scholarship focuses on the relationship between law, organizations, and social change, particularly focusing on law and social movements and the legal profession. He is currently co-PI on a multi-year project investigating sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace.
His own research has focused on the relationship between law, organizations, and social change. Much of his research has focused on law and social movements and he has written extensively about the institutionalization of pro bono practice in large law firms. He is currently co-PI on a large grant from the U.S. Department of Labor focusing on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace.
Professor Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an "unlikely star in the tech world," and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe. Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.
Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer. She has served on the board of a number or progressive and civil rights organizations, including the Gravel Institute, the DataCenter, and the Berkeley Law Foundation. Prof. Dubal now serves on the board of the Public Rights Project.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College
- William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College where he has also been Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty.
He has a long record of service to the Law & Society Association, which he first joined in 1973.
He served as Secretary from 1993-1995 and President from 1998-1999. He played a leading role in LSA's efforts to mentor graduate students and young scholars and in the development of the Association's Graduate Student Workshop and Summer Institute in Sociolegal Studies. He has been on numerous committees, including the Advisory Board on Minority Student Fellowships, the Program Committee, and co-chaired LSA's 40 Anniversary Development Campaign.
He is author or editor of more than ninety books including The Death Penalty on the Ballot: American Democracy and the Fate of Capital Punishment, and Something to Believe in: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyers (with Stuart Scheingold). His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, NBC. com, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Hill, State, and USA Today.
Zozo is a regular member of the Law and Society Association. She served as a member of the Program Committee, LSA Global Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal, July 2022. She also served as a member of the LSA Herbert Jacob Book Prize Committee, which is responsible to choose a winner of the Herbert Jacob Book Prize. She was also appointed as the co-chair with Prof Heinz Klug and Prof Frank Munger for the Governance Committee for the LSA in May 2021.