I am Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and an Associate Professor (by courtesy) in the George Washington University Sociology Department. Additionally, I am affiliated with the American Bar Foundation, and am an incoming Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Before GW Law, I taught in the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My JD and PhD are from Stanford University, where I worked with the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
One of my current projects, supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation, investigates the relationship between everyday people and law, and the implications of this relationship for people's ability to access justice and solve their problems. I use a diverse, representative sample of over 3600 people in the U.S. to understand how they think about civil justice challenges, as well as which civil justice challenges they actually face. My most recent article is an empirical study of how different intersectional identities (race, class, gender, rurality, disability, sexual orientation, and more) affect people's chances of having a civil justice problem. Additionally, I am using in-depth longitudinal interviews with a subset of these survey respondents to understand how people navigate civil justice challenges over time.
Another large part of my research agenda focuses on developing a better empirical understanding of legal education and law school's social and organizational structures. My book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018) draws on interviews and surveys of 1100 law students. In 2020, I launched a new longitudinal study that follows more than 50 law students from all over the U.S., beginning before they started law school and continuing to the present time, and using multiple surveys and in-depth interviews to develop a comprehensive understanding of their law school experiences.
My past work has looked at a number of areas related to law and society, and has included an ethnography of Hawaiian cockfighting gangs, an in-depth interview study of parole commissioners deciding whether to release people serving life sentences in prison, examination of people's willingness to assert constitutional rights in encounters with police, and an analysis of how queer jurors' treatment under the law underscores the need for voir dire reform. This research has been published in peer-reviewed social science journals such as Law & Society Review and Social Forces, in law reviews such as the Harvard Law Review and California Law Review, and cited by multiple state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of my current projects, supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation, investigates the relationship between everyday people and law, and the implications of this relationship for people's ability to access justice and solve their problems. I use a diverse, representative sample of over 3600 people in the U.S. to understand how they think about civil justice challenges, as well as which civil justice challenges they actually face. My most recent article is an empirical study of how different intersectional identities (race, class, gender, rurality, disability, sexual orientation, and more) affect people's chances of having a civil justice problem. Additionally, I am using in-depth longitudinal interviews with a subset of these survey respondents to understand how people navigate civil justice challenges over time.
Another large part of my research agenda focuses on developing a better empirical understanding of legal education and law school's social and organizational structures. My book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford University Press, 2018) draws on interviews and surveys of 1100 law students. In 2020, I launched a new longitudinal study that follows more than 50 law students from all over the U.S., beginning before they started law school and continuing to the present time, and using multiple surveys and in-depth interviews to develop a comprehensive understanding of their law school experiences.
My past work has looked at a number of areas related to law and society, and has included an ethnography of Hawaiian cockfighting gangs, an in-depth interview study of parole commissioners deciding whether to release people serving life sentences in prison, examination of people's willingness to assert constitutional rights in encounters with police, and an analysis of how queer jurors' treatment under the law underscores the need for voir dire reform. This research has been published in peer-reviewed social science journals such as Law & Society Review and Social Forces, in law reviews such as the Harvard Law Review and California Law Review, and cited by multiple state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.