I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an Associate Editor of Law & Society Review. I have a JD and a PhD, and sometimes I work as an adjunct law professor.
I investigate how people think about and interact with the law, and the effects of these patterns on distributive justice and people's ability to solve problems. My work on the relationship between access to justice and legal consciousness is supported by NSF and the American Bar Foundation. This work asks questions like: Why might some people go to legal aid offices to solve problems, while others do not? Why might some people be more inclined to fight a bill, sue a neighbor, or refuse a police search? How do race and class manifest in interactions with the legal system? These questions are core to the relationship between social science and law.
Additionally, I have a strong interest in law schools. I hope to help improve them as institutions by developing a better empirical understanding of the social and organizational structures that comprise legal education. My book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018) draws on interviews and surveys of 1100 law students from over 100 law schools. My current study that follows 53 law students longitudinally over the course of their 1L year and beyond.
Sometimes I write about other aspects of the legal system, and I particularly like trying to learn about the social mechanisms within parts of the justice system about which we know relatively little. In my work on parole hearings, I have examined which factors influence a person's odds of receiving a grant, including indirect racial effects; how parole commissioners make sense of amorphous concepts like remorse; and the implications of my findings for racial disparities in mass incarceration.
My work appears in Law & Society Review, Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, Social Forces, and many other journals, and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Washington State Supreme Court. I have worked in a number of legal settings, including the Federal Defender's Office for the Northern District of California, the San Joaquin DA's Office, and the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School.
I investigate how people think about and interact with the law, and the effects of these patterns on distributive justice and people's ability to solve problems. My work on the relationship between access to justice and legal consciousness is supported by NSF and the American Bar Foundation. This work asks questions like: Why might some people go to legal aid offices to solve problems, while others do not? Why might some people be more inclined to fight a bill, sue a neighbor, or refuse a police search? How do race and class manifest in interactions with the legal system? These questions are core to the relationship between social science and law.
Additionally, I have a strong interest in law schools. I hope to help improve them as institutions by developing a better empirical understanding of the social and organizational structures that comprise legal education. My book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018) draws on interviews and surveys of 1100 law students from over 100 law schools. My current study that follows 53 law students longitudinally over the course of their 1L year and beyond.
Sometimes I write about other aspects of the legal system, and I particularly like trying to learn about the social mechanisms within parts of the justice system about which we know relatively little. In my work on parole hearings, I have examined which factors influence a person's odds of receiving a grant, including indirect racial effects; how parole commissioners make sense of amorphous concepts like remorse; and the implications of my findings for racial disparities in mass incarceration.
My work appears in Law & Society Review, Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, Social Forces, and many other journals, and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Washington State Supreme Court. I have worked in a number of legal settings, including the Federal Defender's Office for the Northern District of California, the San Joaquin DA's Office, and the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School.