The American Bar Foundation (ABF) has named Laura Beth Nielsen as its eleventh Executive Director, succeeding Interim Executive Director and ABF Affiliated Research Professor Bryant Garth. She will assume the role September 1 and will be the first woman to lead the organization as it approaches its milestone seventy-fifth anniversary.
Nielsen has been a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation for more than twenty-five years and holds a joint appointment at Northwestern University, where she is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair and a Professor of Sociology. She previously served as Director of Northwestern’s Center for Legal Studies. A leading sociologist of law, Nielsen’s research examines how legal institutions shape—and are shaped by—inequality across race, gender, and class. Much of her work focuses specifically on legal consciousness and the ways individuals and communities come to understand and respond to law. She earned a PhD and JD from the University of California, Berkeley.
She is the author of License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (Princeton University Press) and coauthor of Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (University of Chicago Press). Her forthcoming book, The Hero and the Monsignor: Law, Sexual Violence and the Catholic Church (University of Chicago Press), coauthored with ABF MacCrate Research Chair Robert L. Nelson, examines the intersection of law, sexual violence, and the Catholic Church. Her work has appeared in leading sociolegal journals, including the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Law & Society Review, and Law & Social Inquiry, as well as in major law reviews. It has also reached broad public audiences through coverage and commentary in outlets such as the New York Times, TIME, and the Los Angeles Times.
Over the course of her career, Nielsen’s work has been recognized with numerous honors, including prestigious book and article prizes and the Law and Society Association’s Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award. Her research has also been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. In 2020, she was elected president of the Law and Society Association, where she concluded her term by introducing the concept of “relational rights,” which argues that law must be understood not as a set of individual entitlements but as a system that structures relationships central to social well-being. That framework now guides major ongoing research at the American Bar Foundation.
At the ABF, Nielsen is deeply embedded in the life of the institution, contributing scholarship while also leading committees central to the ABF’s mission and mentoring emerging scholars. She is a frequent presenter at seminars and events organized by and for the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, where she regularly shares her research and engages with lawyers, judges, and other practitioners, reflecting the ABF’s core belief that research is strengthened through exchange with the profession it seeks to inform.
Nielsen’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the ABF and for research on law and legal institutions more broadly. As federal investment in social science research has declined, the base of reliable, publicly accessible research on how law operates in practice and what it delivers for the public has also narrowed. As a result, the ABF’s role in producing independent, peer-reviewed scholarship on legal institutions has only grown in significance.
Nielsen has emphasized the urgency and responsibility of the moment. She said she is honored to step into the role at such a consequential time for the institution and the field. “The American Bar Foundation has spent more than seven decades producing independent research on law and legal institutions,” she said. “That work has never been more important than it is right now.”
Board President Sandra J. Chan welcomed Nielsen’s appointment: “We are thrilled to name Laura Beth Nielsen as the first woman Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation. She has been a valued member of the ABF community for many years, and her scholarship and longstanding connection make her exceptionally well-qualified to lead the organization as it enters its seventy-fifth year.”
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.