Speaker Series: Ashley Rubin

Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnation. Using the subfield of punishment and society as a case study, we argue that the field suffers from a kind of stalled academic dialecticism. We argue that various factors have worked together to impede a standard dialectical process of theoretical growth by dissuading scholars from moving onto a new stage of innovative research and incentivizing them to continue to pursue smaller-scale, less innovative studies. However, precisely because the field has a rich, diverse array of scholarship available to glean, synthesize, and use to make next-generation insights, the field is poised for breakthrough research—particularly, generalizable theories of legal phenomena—if only scholars are willing to pursue them. (Paper published in Law & Social Inquiry (2025) and was coauthored with Alena K. Shalaby.)

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Dr. Ashley Rubin is an interdisciplinary social scientist specializing in the study of criminal punishment as a social phenomenon; their work, described more below, sits at the intersections of criminology, history, sociology, and sociolegal studies. Dr. Rubin is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She holds a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley, where she graduated in 2013. Dr. Rubin’s primary intellectual homes are the interdisciplinary fields of law and society and punishment and society. From 2023 to 2026, she is co-editor (with Shauhin Talesh and Katharina Heyer) of the Law & Society Review, the flagship journal of the Law and Society Association. In an effort to generate more locally relevant research, Dr. Rubin founded the Hawai‘i Crime Lab, which uses social science to provide useful information to Hawai‘i’s residents, visitors, and policymakers about crime and criminal justice on O‘ahu.