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2010 ABF Doctoral Fellow Presentations

ABF Doctoral Fellow Presentations:

Shaun Ossei-Owusu- University of California, Berkeley

"Slipping through the Chasms: The Criminal Justice System and the Interstices of Discretion"
Abstract: Actors in criminal justice system in the United States exercise varying degrees of discretion that are inherently necessary the institution’s functionality. At the various stages in the criminal justice process (i.e. arrest, interrogation, arraignment, indictment, prosecutorial charging and plea bargaining, trial, sentencing, parole) state actors employ their experiential judgment and discretion to make important decisions. Sociological, legal and criminological scholarship tend to focus on discretion in individual or clustered stages as opposed to taking more cumulative approaches to understanding decision-making. Understanding discretion in the aggregate can illuminate how the broad rein given to criminal justice actors, coupled with the opaque nature of penal bureaucracies can produce decision-making processes that exacerbate social inequalities. My qualitative project seeks to probe this reality, but eschews an approach that simply searches for inequality, and also aims to demonstrate how the changing demographics of the penal bureaucracies, organizational imperatives, individual interests can also lead to subversive or progressive uses of discretion.

Kim Welch- University of Maryland

"People at Law:  Subordinate Southerners and Localized Law in Mississippi and Louisiana, 1820-1860"
Abstract: This project investigates the relationship between subordinate southerners—poor whites, free and enslaved blacks, and women of all classes and races—and localized law in the Natchez District of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1820 and 1860.  Specifically, this dissertation asks if local legal culture provided subordinated people with an opportunity to improve their daily lives and, if so, whether they succeeded in using law to challenge the hierarchical system of power in the planter-dominated South.  Antebellum Louisiana and Mississippi, with its enormous cotton and sugar plantations, large populations of slaves, and some of the richest planters in the American South, seems like an unlikely place for a legal culture that included domestic dependants such as wives or slaves, the poor, and free blacks.  However, as my research demonstrates—despite law that limited their access to the courts, as well as the social and racial inequalities they faced—subordinated people had an important presence in their local legal culture.  They employed their local courts frequently (and often successfully). Through a close analysis of nearly 2000 local court cases involving African Americans, white women, and the poor in antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana, I challenge the assumption that southern courts represented a space where members of the elite exercised hegemony.  Instead, I posit subordinate peoples as vibrant, vocal actors in their own history, rather than making them anonymous objects of southern law and policy.  Examining localized law provides us with a window into how law worked in the daily lives of those with few legal or political rights, and how they mobilized it to their advantage.  A range of southerners understood the legal process intimately.  Even those with limited rights participated in local law-making processes, leaving their imprint on the local legal system.  The very nature of local legal culture in the antebellum South necessitated the participation of all community members—white and black, slave and free, male and female.  Through their use of and influence on localized law, subordinated people in the slave South had the opportunity to actively shape the decisions and institutions that governed their lives, even if they were denied rights in other areas of the legal and political system.


Destiny Peery, Northwestern University

"Exploring the Intersections Race, Psychology, and Law"
Abstract: Typically research in the area of psychology and law related to race has focused on empirical examinations of the ways race may bias legal judgments or procedures. These studies have examined these types of effects in areas like eyewitness testimony, jury representation, and differential conviction and sentencing patterns, for example. These investigations are valuable for understanding the workings of the legal system and the real world implications of legal outcomes, but there are other ways in which the law can also influence us at a broader conceptual level. The law informs our social norms and other rules, including those that are applied to understand race. While the relationship between the social and legal conceptions of race is likely bidirectional, the historical legal rules of race likely played a special role in defining racial categories in the minds of lay people, forming a foundation for contemporary approaches to racial perceptions and categorization despite the antiquated notions they represent. This talk focuses on the ways in which legal theories of race can be and have been translated into lay social theories of race that have been documented in recent research on the categorization of racially ambiguous or multiracial persons.

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