Research faculty profiles

Bernadette Atuahene: Faculty Fellow; Focus: Law and international development, particularly the dispossession and restitution of property rights in the developing world. Research has examined the challenges faced by transitional democracies…
Traci Burch: Research Professor; Focus: U.S. politics, political behavior, race and ethnic politics, criminal justice. Current research examines the effects of criminal convictions and incarceration on individual and neighborhood voter…
John Comaroff: Research Professor; Focus: Legal and political anthropology with a current focus on the tensions between the governance of the new South Africa and the rising incidence of informal justice and cultural policing.
Barbara A. Curran: Research Professor Emerita; Focus: Statistical studies of the legal profession, legal needs of the public, gender bias in the courts.
Stephen Daniels: Research Professor; Focus: Law and public policy; components of the U.S. civil justice system; U.S. Supreme Court/Constitutional Law. Research has addressed legal services for the poor, public opinion on the legal system,…
Shari Seidman Diamond: Research Professor; Focus: Legal decision-making, including conflicts between expertise and impartiality; discretion and control; equality and individuation; and science and law. Research addresses how these conflicts…
Ronit Dinovitzer: Faculty Fellow; Focus: The sociology of law, with a particular interest in the legal profession, focusing on the sources of inequality within the profession and the mechanisms that produce and reproduce them. Recent work…
Bryant G. Garth: ABF Director Emeritus/Dean, Southwestern Law School; Focus: The legal profession, dispute resolution, and internationalization. The topics intersect around the question of how internationalization—seen as the import and export of ideas, technologies,…
Austan Goolsbee: Research Professor; Focus: The impact of public policy on the economy, particularly tax policy and policies affecting the Internet and the information economy. Research is predominantly data intensive work evaluating these…
John Hagan: Research Professor; Focus: International criminal law, war crimes, lawyers, youth crime, war resistance.
Terence Halliday: Research Professor; Focus: The globalization of law in markets and politics. The research on law and markets focuses on corporate bankruptcy law and studies (1) how global lawmaking occurs in international organizations; (2)…
James J. Heckman: Research Professor; Focus: Human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood. Research has provided policymakers with new insights into such areas as education,…
Carol A. Heimer: Research Professor; Focus: Overlapping normative systems; currently researching the normative systems of law and medicine in the world of HIV medicine.
John P. Heinz: Research Professor; Focus: The legal profession, especially its social structure and organization of work, and the roles of lawyers in politics. Some of this research uses network analysis to depict the interrelationships (or…
Bonnie Honig: Research Professor; Focus: Normative political theory, contemporary democratic theory with particular attention to the area of law and politics. Research addresses how constitutions, legal norms, the centrality of rights, and…
Ryon Lancaster: Faculty Fellow; Focus: Organizational sociology, sociology of law, economic sociology, and historical sociology.
Steven D. Levitt: Research Professor; Focus: Crime, the criminal justice system, and corruption, and a wide variety of issues related to racial disparity and education.
Joanne Martin: Research Professor; Focus: Access to justice issues as they are affected by formal changes in the law, policy-related activity, concerns about social justice embodied in the professional responsibility obligations of lawyers,…
Elizabeth Mertz: Research Professor; Focus: Language and law, legal education, interdisciplinary translation, family law. Research focuses on the intersection of law and language, combining anthropological and legal perspectives. Empirical…
Janice Nadler: Research Professor; Focus: Compliance with the law; perceptions of responsibility and fairness; and negotiation and conflict.
Robert L. Nelson: ABF Director & MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession; Focus: The social organization of law practice and the relationship between law and social inequality. Research has addressed transformations in the legal profession, the role of corporate counsel, gender…
Laura Beth Nielsen: Research Professor; Focus: The sociology of law, with particular interests in legal consciousness and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class.
William J. Novak: Research Professor; Focus: United States legal, political, and intellectual history, with special emphasis on issues of liberalism, state-building, and public law.
Dylan C. Penningroth: Research Professor; Focus: African American history, comparative histories of slavery and emancipation, and socio-legal history. Research has focused on the history of black family and community life, the ownership of…
Susan P. Shapiro: Research Professor; Focus: Social construction, social organization, and social control of fiduciary or trust relationships. Research has examined topics such as white collar crime, ethics, conflict of interest, the…
Christopher L. Tomlins: Research Professor; Focus: My research has focused on topics in Anglo-American legal history across a broad front, from the “early modern” era (the beginning of the sixteenth century) into the later twentieth…
Victoria Saker Woeste: Research Professor; Focus: Understanding how law mediates and shapes the relationships among the state, the market, and society in U.S. history; uncovering institutional and organizational responses to legal and economic…

Research faculty profiles

Faculty