The American Bar Foundation is pleased to welcome seven Visiting Scholars to the ABF research community. The scholars of the 2025-26 cohort are: Portia Jin Xiong, Rashmee Singh, William Darwall, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Joachim Savelsberg, Kasey Henricks, and Katheryn Birks Harvey.
The ABF’s Visiting Scholar Program invites scholars from around the world to join the ABF’s intellectual community on a temporary basis. The program provides scholars on leave or sabbatical, as well as early career scholars, with an opportunity to take advantage of the ABF’s diverse sociolegal community and excellent facilities. Scholars participate in community activities, including a weekly seminar which brings together researchers across the ABF. Former Visiting Scholars represent the range of areas of expertise, research approaches, academic backgrounds, and experiences which characterize participants in the program.
The scholars in this year’s cohort specialize in many areas of sociolegal scholarship. Their research has addressed state lotteries, the governance of sex work, legal education, workplace management, and more. The cohort includes scholars at all stages of their careers who have taught, studied, and researched at a wide variety of institutions.
Meet the ABF’s 2025-26 Visiting Scholars:
Portia Jin Xiong (she/her) is a JD/PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include the anthropology of law, gender, race, class, and higher education. Xiong’s dissertation, “Admitted but Not Advanced: Diversity, Minor Feelings, Asian and Asian American Law Students in the United States,” investigates the structural barriers to equal opportunity and full inclusion in legal education and the legal profession faced by Asians and Asian Americans. Read more about Portia Jin Xiong here.
Rashmee Singh (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include feminist legal theory, feminist criminology, specialized courts, gender-based violence, and the governance of sex work. She is at work on two research projects: one examining the impact of criminal legal reforms on adult sex workers in the wake of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution panics in the US and Canada, and another which considers the impact of COVID-19 related disruptions on domestic violence shelters in Ontario, Canada. Read more about Rashmee Singh here.
William Darwall is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law whose research focuses on the law and politics of work and workplace management. Darwall’s dissertation employs a critical and historical account of management science as a basis for a reconstructed normative account of the legitimacy of appropriate legal regulation of workplace hierarchy, authority, and control, with special attention paid to emerging techniques and technologies of workplace management. Read more about William Darwall here.
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She is the Provost Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Sullivan is also an Affiliate Professor of Law Emeritus at Mauer School of Law, and the Former Director of the IU Center for Religion and the Human. Drawing on her academic training in both religious studies and the law, Sullivan’s research focuses on the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law, with particular focus on the intersection of religion and law in the US within a broader comparative field. Read more about Winnifred Fallers Sullivan here.
Joachim Savelsberg is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and (by courtesy) of Law at the University of Minnesota. He is a past holder of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota, which is dedicated to issues of human rights and genocide. His current research includes a project on NGO-prosecutorial networks in universal jurisdiction proceedings. He is also at work on a cohort study of experiences of German Jews during the 1910s and 1930s in Germany, based on the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives. Read more about Joachim Savelsberg here.
Kasey Henricks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. Henrick’s research engages with innovative methodologies to foreground familiar objects—from lottery tickets to parking citations—within broader changes of the political economy. Within this work, Henricks takes empirical detours through these highly recognizable objects to theorize how institutionalized consequences of racism, classism, and many other “-isms” endure through quotidian practices in public finance. Read more about Kasey Henricks here.
Katheryn Birks Harvey is a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and a JD from Vanderbilt Law School. Her dissertation traces the history of the personal injury bar in the twentieth century and how the advertising regulations placed on attorneys intersect with tort reform. Before she earned her PhD, Harvey practiced law for six years. Read more about Katheryn Birks Harvey here.
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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