2021-22 Access to Justice Scholars
Robin Bartram
Robin Bartram is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. She studies cities, regulations, and housing, with a particular focus on housing conditions. Her current book project uses the case of building code enforcement to argue that government intervention in housing conditions is a matter of justice.
Project Description: As an ABF/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholar, Bartram will conduct interviews with property owners who are dealing with environmental issues related to the location of their homes and homeowners who are at risk of displacement due to the condition of their homes. Her goal is to investigate how people imagine and articulate responsibility for damage, repair, maintenance, and depreciation. Overall, her project will use homeowners as a case to investigate the extent to which how people articulate justice and injustice is key to their ability to access it.
Brittany Friedman
Brittany Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. A sociologist of punishment and social control, she researches race and prison order, inequality, mobilization against the carceral state, and the criminal legal system as an economic market. Her first book is under contract with The University of North Carolina Press and is tentatively titled "Born in Blood." The book traces how control strategies were institutionalized and designed to eradicate Black political protest and the implications for contemporary prison order and racial inequality. In addition to her book, Friedman is Co-PI of a comparative study of pay-to-stay practices and PI of the Project on Covid-19 and New Jersey Prisons. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Sociological Forum, Sociological Perspectives, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, and Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis.
Project Description: As an Access to Justice Faculty Scholar, Friedman will research the relationship between legal representation, pay-to-stay, and civil recoupment strategies. Pay-to-stay refers to the practice of cities, counties, and states charging incarcerated people fees for the partial or total cost of their incarceration. Friedman's project is titled "Pay-to-Stay as a Civil Justice Crisis: How Civil Lawsuits Against Incarcerated People for the Cost of Incarceration Deepen Socioeconomic Inequality."
Shannon Gleeson
Shannon Gleeson is professor of Labor Relations, Law, & History at the Cornell ILR School. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously on the faculty of the Latin American & Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include "Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America" (University of Texas Press, 2019, edited with Xóchitl Bada), "Building Citizenship From Below: Precarity, Migration, and Agency" (Routledge, 2017, edited with Marcel Paret), "Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States" (University of California Press, 2016), "The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants" (Routledge, 2014, edited with John Park), and "Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston" (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her ongoing National Science Foundation – funded research with Els de Graauw examines the local implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Project Description: With support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the American Bar Foundation, Gleeson will be working with colleagues Kate Griffith and Patricia Campos-Medina to examine the impact of immigration status on worker precarity, especially in the era of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial inequality.
Karin D. Martin
Karin D. Martin is Assistant Professor at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington, where she is also Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology. She is a crime policy specialist whose areas of expertise are monetary sanctions, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and decision-making in the criminal legal context. She received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020. She is Affiliated Faculty with the West Coast Poverty Center and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals across disciplines, including: Social Issues and Policy Review, Annual Review of Criminology, Sociological Perspectives, Law and Human Behavior, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, International Journal of Prisoner Health, Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review.
Project Description: Martin’s project will examine amnesty for criminal legal debt, which instantiates access to justice by directly engaging a largely disadvantaged population in beneficial court processes. She will investigate how amnesty for unpaid court-ordered debt affects subsequent criminal justice system involvement and housing insecurity.
Victor D. Quintanilla
Victor D. Quintanilla is a Professor of Law at the IU Maurer School of Law and an Affiliated Professor of the IU Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Quintanilla’s research investigates civil justice design, access to justice, and legal education by drawing on theory and methods within the field of social psychology, including experiments conducted with judges, lawyers, law students, and members of the public. He currently serves as the PI of a research line that harnesses psychological methods to examine the experiences of unrepresented persons in virtual court proceedings. Quintanilla also examines how unrepresented persons, particularly racial/ethnic minorities and members of disadvantaged groups, are socially constructed in the civil justice system.
Project Description: While at the American Bar Foundation, Quintanilla will empirically examine whether structural, technological, and psychological challenges occur for unrepresented persons in virtual courts and the extent to which these challenges exacerbate biases that disadvantage unrepresented persons within virtual courts. He also seeks to design and evaluate structural and psychological interventions to improve access to justice for unrepresented persons in virtual court proceedings.
Michele Statz
Michele Statz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth and affiliated faculty with the University of Minnesota Law School. Michele is trained as an anthropologist of law, and her research examines how socio-spatial dimensions of rurality influence access to justice, rights mobilization, and the efforts of tribal and state court judges in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. This research has appeared in Law & Society Review, Harvard Law & Policy Review, and American Journal of Public Health and is generously funded by the National Science Foundation’s Law and Science Program. Michele’s other work includes interdisciplinary and mixed-media projects on global youth and mobility; reproductive justice; and public interest immigration lawyering. Her first book, "Lawyering an Uncertain Cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the U.S." (Vanderbilt U Press), was published in 2018. Statz holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Washington.
Project Description: Statz project will explore how rural place attachments are utilized by active judges and interpreted by individuals without counsel in rural tribal and state courts. By documenting the narrative and affective practices that provide an experience of mutuality, trust, and “access,” her project offers critical place-based insights for improving access to justice within and across diverse rural jurisdictions.
Nicole Summers
Nicole Summers is a Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau of Harvard Law School, where she supervises and teaches clinical law students. Nicole’s clinical work focuses primarily on the representation of low-income tenants in eviction proceedings and low-wage workers in wage theft claims. Her scholarship on eviction, substandard housing conditions, fair housing, and other topics has appeared in both law and interdisciplinary journals including University of Chicago Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Nicole holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Masters of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Nicole is also currently a 2021-2022 Bellow Scholar and a Research Affiliate at the NYU Furman Center.
Project Description: Summer's ABF/JPB research project will investigate the specific legal pathways by which eviction filings result in actual eviction. She will also explore the extent to which characteristics of the eviction case, tenancy, and/or landlord are correlated with actual eviction once a case is filed in court