September 2023 – August 2024
Willa Sachs is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Yale University and a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Kenyon College in 2016. Prior to attending Yale, she worked at the ABF as the Editorial Coordinator of Law & Social Inquiry. Sachs’ research interests include legal consciousness, legal mobilization, cultural sociology, and social movements.
Sachs has recently published an article (with Jeffrey C. Alexander) in Cultural Sociology. This article examines the role of social movements as a mediating force between public opinion and presidential politics, using the second-wave American feminist movement as a case study.
Sachs’ dissertation, “Panther Law: Legal Innovation and Performative Politics in the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971,” focuses on the role of law and legal practice in the ideological and political agenda of the Black Panther Party (BPP). During her time at the ABF, Sachs will work on three dissertation chapters. The first examines the relationship between political trials and the production of liberal legal consciousness through an analysis of four high-profile criminal trials involving the Black Panther Party. The second concerns the role of “people’s tribunals” in the protest repertoire of the BPP, in which activists symbolically convicted state actors or exonerated activists identified as political prisoners. The third considers the function of American constitutional thought in BPP discourse, and in particular its role in the BPP’s demand for all-Black juries.