Laura Beth Nielsen (she/her) is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair and Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.
Nielsen’s research focuses on law’s capacity for social change, and her primary field is the sociology of law. Her research is particularly interested in legal consciousness—that is, how ordinary people understand the law—and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class.
Her most recent book, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (with Berry and Nelson, University of Chicago Press, 2017) shows how litigation’s adversarial nature imposes such heavy personal and financial costs on plaintiffs that they often feel like they’ve lost even when they win, while defendants feel unfairly targeted by what they see as frivolous suits. As even favorable outcomes rarely change the underlying workplace conditions, the book argues that the current approach to discrimination law can end up reinforcing the very hierarchies it was meant to dismantle. The book received an honorable mention for the American Sociological Association’s Best Book Award, Sociology of Law Section, in 2018.
Nielsen is also the author of License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (Princeton University Press, 2004). Nielsen argues that racist and sexist street speech creates, reproduces, and reinforces existing systems of hierarchy in public places, and that the law normalizes and justifies these offensive public interactions rather than remedying them, effectively granting a “license to harass.” In it, Nielsen does not take an explicit First Amendment position. Rather, she weighs whether the democratic and societal benefits of allowing such speech outweigh the burdens it imposes, while insisting those burdens and the people who bear them stay part of the debate. She is the editor of three books, including most recently Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Rights (Ashgate/Routledge, 2007).
A new book, authored by Nielsen and ABF MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession Robert L. Nelson, is expected from University of Chicago Press in 2027. Titled “The Hero and the Monsignor: Law, Sexual Violence, and the Catholic Church,” the book is a culmination of a research project lead by Nielsen and Nelson at the ABF. A careful study of one plaintiff’s childhood sexual abuse case against the Archdiocese of Dubuque and his lawyers, the book analyzes the institutional circumstances that enable abuse and the impact of legal and institutional responses to abuse. The book aims to illuminate the problem of sexual abuse within institutions and the capacity of the law to address this problem.
Nielsen is also at work on a new book-length manuscript. Tentatively titled “The Democracy We Deserve: Freedom, Rights, and the Road Back to One Another,” the manuscript argues that American democracy is decaying because it treats rights and liberties as individual possessions rather than treating them as relational infrastructures and practices. Taking up the relational thinking of the manuscript itself, Nielsen plans to convene a conference at the ABF to support the completion of the manuscript in collaboration with a small group of senior scholars.
Nielsen’s scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, UCLA Law Review, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, Stanford Journal of Law and Policy, and the Wisconsin Law Review. Her work and commentary have appeared in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Time, the Washington Post, and USA Today. She has appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News, PBS Newshour, Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell, and many other programs.
Nielsen is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the MacArthur Foundation, among other organizations.
