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Atinuke Adediran
Fordham University
Visiting Scholar
2024 to 2025
Adediran will write a book about how large companies–often in response to societal and shareholder pressure–construct public images demonstrating their commitment to racial equity. She documents that too often companies use carefully constructed images to shield themselves from criticism about racial inequities instead of enacting corporate policies that would benefit communities of color.
Monica Bell
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Bell will work on a book about efforts to reform U.S. law and policy on race and class marginalization. Drawing in part on interview data from a participatory study of black youth, she concludes that policymakers often miss an important challenge confronting lawmakers in poor communities of color: legal estrangement, or the process through which institutions perpetuate the idea that marginalized groups do not fully share in all the rights and freedoms that flow to other Americans.
Tonya Brito
University of Wisconsin
Visiting Scholar
2018 to 2019
Brito will explore the challenges faced by low-income defendants who owe unpaid child support and cannot afford attorney representation within the family court system. She will use interviews, court records, and ethnographic observations of child support enforcement hearings to compare the legal outcomes of parents who owe child support in two states: Wisconsin, which provides full attorney representation to defendants, and Illinois, which provides only limited legal assistance, such as informational websites and hotlines.
Samuel Gross
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar
2007 to 2008
Phoebe Ellsworth, Frank Murphy Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Law at the University of Michigan, and Samuel Gross, Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, will write a book investigating the causes and consequences of false convictions in criminal cases in the United States.
Jack Knight
Washington University in St. Louis
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
Jack Knight, the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and James Johnson, associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester, will examine the challenges that models of political institutions pose to democratic theorists. Their research will show that the results of these models, primarily from game theory, do not represent so dire a threat to democratic commitments as commonly is supposed.
Richard O. Lempert
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar
1998 to 1999
Richard O. Lempert, professor of Law and chair of the department of sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will complete a study of Honolulu's public housing eviction process between 1958 and 1987. The policies governing the Hawaii Housing Authority's eviction board have undergone numerous changes, and a once minimal eviction rate has grown to nearly 100% in non-payment of rent cases.
Terry Maroney
Vanderbilt University
Visiting Scholar
2022 to 2023
Maroney will work on a book examining the role of emotion in judges’ experiences, behaviors, and decision making. She will analyze in-depth interviews and survey data to better understand the ways in which emotions and management of emotions interact with the constraints and demands of various judicial roles.
Tracey Meares
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Meares (together with Benjamin Justice) will co-author a book on how experiences with criminal legal institutions shape one’s civic identity. Drawing on scholarship from law, history, and the social sciences, they will examine how legally innocent people encounter three phases of the “curriculum” of American justice: policing, pretrial detention, and adjudication.
Rebecca Sandefur
Arizona State University
Visiting Scholar
2019 to 2020
Sandefur will explore the role of the civil justice system in exacerbating social inequality. Using survey and administrative data and interviews, she will investigate the prevalence and impact of civil justice problems, such as discrimination, debt, and renters’ issues. She will study how individuals think about civil justice problems, including why they do or do not pursue legal action. She will also examine how access to the civil justice system differs by race and socioeconomic status, and evaluate interventions designed to ameliorate civil justice problems and reduce inequality.
Katherine V. W. Stone
University of California, Los Angeles
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Katherine V. W. Stone, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, will undertake a comparative study of the changing nature of work and its impact on labor and employment regulatory systems in several developed nations. In recent years there has been a major shift away from stable long-term relationships between employees and firms towards more “flexible” arrangements, often involving temporary workers and independent contractors.
Julie Suk
Fordham University
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Suk will examine how the arduous process of amending the U.S. Constitution has shaped the prospects for equality and social inclusion as a matter of law and public policy. The project draws on the legislative and ratification histories of the Civil War amendments that sought the inclusion of African Americans, the progressive era amendments that sought greater distributive justice and the inclusion of women, and several failed amendments.
Tom R. Tyler
Yale University
Visiting Researcher
Tom Tyler is the Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He will examine how the law and legal institutions are currently structured around a coercive model of authority and could be differently and better organized around an alternative model of legal authority based upon popular legitimacy.
Tom R. Tyler
New York University
Visiting Scholar
1999 to 2000
Tom Tyler, professor of psychology at New York University, will write a monograph on trust in the context of citizens' relations with the police and courts. Based on survey research of an ethnically diverse sample of citizens in Oakland and Los Angeles, his work will show how the law can function more effectively if authorities gain the trust of citizens by making decisions in ways citizens view as fair.
Albert H. Yoon
University of Toronto
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Albert H. Yoon, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, will write a series of articles illuminating the relationship between legal representation and social inequality in the United States and Canada. Yoon hypothesizes that vast disparities in the quality of legal representation impose not only private costs on individual litigants, but also considerable costs on society as a whole, exacerbating and even creating social inequality along a number of dimensions.