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This edition, featuring Bob Nelson, provides valuable insights into global governance through the exploration of practices of the rule of law across nations.

Our social norms and moral values shape our beliefs about the propriety of different types of market exchanges. Janice Nadler considers social and moral influences on beliefs about property and the consequences of these beliefs for the legal regulation of property.

Ronit Dinovitzer analyzes the financial benefits that contribute to the prestige and desirability of elite status in the legal profession.

Although the wisdom of mass incarceration is now widely questioned, incarceration rates have fallen far less than what would be predicted on the basis of crime trends. Informed by institutional studies of path dependence, sociolegal scholarship on legal discretion, and research suggesting that “late mass incarceration” is characterized by a moderated response to nonviolent crime but even stronger penalties for violent offenses, this article analyzes recent sentencing-related reforms and case processing outcomes.

Elizabeth Mertz and Katherine Barnes investigate why post-tenure law professors of color and women professors are dissatisfied with their work lives in this article.

Understanding how real people experience law is a core tenet of the ABF’s research mission. This desire to advance the discussion around access to justice drove ABF researchers Ellen Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen to examine the changing dynamics of workplace discrimination law over a decade ago, culminating in the book report, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality. This edition of Researching Law introduces the findings presented in this book.

This article featuring ABF’s Reuben J. Miller delineates the features of carceral citizenship and the state’s role in the lives of criminalized individuals.

This article, with Bryant Garth, presents insights from fifteen years of qualitative interviews on diversity, hierarchy, and fit in legal careers.

This article examines how individuals’ attitudes toward discrimination affect their perceptions of discrimination in the workplace and the likelihood of engaging in legal mobilization.

This edition of Researching Law introduces the ABF’s first scholar to study the intersections of culture and law in contemporary Native American governance, Justin Richland.

Based on rich interviews with plaintiffs, attorneys, and representatives of defendants and an original national dataset on case outcomes, Rights on Trial reveals the fundamental flaws of workplace discrimination law and offers practical recommendations for how we might better respond to persistent patterns of discrimination.

  • Books

Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality

Robert L. Nelson, Ellen Berrey, Laura Beth Nielsen and Laura Beth Nielsen
Learning and Practicing Law, Protecting Rights and Accessing Justice
June 2017

From University of Chicago Press. More information can be found at rightsontrial.org.

Gerry Handley faced years of blatant race-based harassment before he filed a complaint against his employer: racist jokes, signs reading “KKK” in his work area, and even questions from coworkers as to whether he had sex with his daughter as slaves supposedly did. He had an unusually strong case, with copious documentation and coworkers’ support, and he settled for $50,000, even winning back his job. But victory came at a high cost. Legal fees cut into Mr. Handley’s winnings, and tensions surrounding the lawsuit poisoned the workplace. A year later, he lost his job due to downsizing by his company. Mr. Handley exemplifies the burden plaintiffs bear in contemporary civil rights litigation. In the decades since the civil rights movement, we’ve made progress, but not nearly as much as it might seem.

On the surface, America’s commitment to equal opportunity in the workplace has never been clearer. Virtually every company has antidiscrimination policies in place, and there are laws designed to protect these rights across a range of marginalized groups. But, as Ellen Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen compellingly show, this progressive vision of the law falls far short in practice. When aggrieved individuals turn to the law, the adversarial character of litigation imposes considerable personal and financial costs that make plaintiffs feel like they’ve lost regardless of the outcome of the case. Employer defendants also are dissatisfied with the system, often feeling “held up” by what they see as frivolous cases. And even when the case is resolved in the plaintiff’s favor, the conditions that gave rise to the lawsuit rarely change. In fact, the contemporary approach to workplace discrimination law perversely comes to reinforce the very hierarchies that antidiscrimination laws were created to redress.

Based on rich interviews with plaintiffs, attorneys, and representatives of defendants and an original national dataset on case outcomes, Rights on Trial reveals the fundamental flaws of workplace discrimination law and offers practical recommendations for how we might better respond to persistent patterns of discrimination.