Trustees, Class of 2008
Howard Gillman is a Professor of Political Science, History, and Law, and Associate Vice Provost for Research Advancement at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on constitutionalism, the U.S. Supreme Court, and judicial politics. His most recent book is The Votes that Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election (University of Chicago Press, 2001). His first book, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Duke University Press, 1993), received the C. Herman Pritchett Award for "best book in public law" from the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association. He has also co-edited and contributed to two other books on the Supreme Court: Supreme Court Decision-Making: New Institutionalist Approaches (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and The Supreme Court in American Politics: New Institutionalist Interpretations (University Press of Kansas, 1999). He articles have appeared in journals such as The American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and Studies in American Political Development. He has served on the editorial boards of Political Research Quarterly and Law & Social Inquiry. He is currently co-editor (with Maeva Marcus, Mark Tushnet, and Melvin Urofsky) of the book series Cambridge Studies on the American Constitution. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association, and has been a member of the Program Committees for the American Political Science Association, Western Political Science Association, and the American Society of Legal History. From 2003-2005 he Chaired the Membership Committee of the Law and Society Association. He is currently on the Executive Board of the Western Political Science Association. He has twice received the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for "best paper" presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, and he has also received the American Judicature Society Award for the best paper on law and courts presented the previous year at a national or regional political science conference. He has received a number of university and departmental awards for teaching excellence and dedication to students, including the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching . Professor Gillman received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1988 and has been on the faculty at USC since 1990. Before joining the Provost's Office he was Chair of the Department of Political Science.
is Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she teaches courses in criminal law and procedure, critical legal theory, and law and the welfare state. She holds an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard and earned both her JD and her PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from University of California, Berkeley. While in graduate school, Kaaryn practiced law at a large San Francisco firm and established the Economic Justice and Human Rights program as New Voices Fellow at the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland, California. Kaaryn’s research explores gaps between policy, administration and lived experience in the context of public benefits law. She has a manuscript titled The Morality and Rationality of Welfare about the federal welfare reforms of 1996 and is also working on a survey of welfare recipients about their knowledge of welfare rules and proposals purported to promote individual responsibility. She is also writing about the intersection between the welfare system and the criminal justice system. Her other area of interest revolves around the intersection of Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies. Kaaryn has been a member of the Law and Society Association since 1994, and has served on a number of committees including the Connections Committee (Chair), the Program Committee, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Disability. She also sits on the board of the Welfare Law Center in New York is a professor at New York University where she teaches in the Politics Department, the NYU School of Law, and the Institute for Law and Society, which she founded in 1993. In addition to establishing three graduate degree programs (PhD and Joint JD/PhD, JD/MA in Law and Society) and creating the Undergraduate Law & Society Program Minor at NYU, she chaired the "NYU Law & Society Colloquium," organized the Institute’s annual conference with her colleagues, including the 1996 Consortium on Global Law and Social Science. Her experience developing graduate and undergraduate legal studies lead to the formation of the Consortium on Graduate Law and Society Programs in 1997, co-founded with Malcolm Feeley and David Goldberg. These institution-building projects were inspired by the training she had at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD, Political Science; Minor, Law in 1982) and support from her mentors there (Joel Grossman, Murray Edelman, Malcolm Feeley, Robert Gordon and David Trubek), as well as her colleagues in the Amherst Seminar on Legal Ideology and Legal Process. In her scholarship on the politics of legal reforms, she argues that dispute processes (mediation and regulatory negotiation) and litigation (federal regulatory and federal appellate civil) are forums for political participation and sites of ideological production about law and legal institutions. In addition to her first book, Shadow Justice (1985), she has published articles in the major sociolegal journals (Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, Law & Social Inquiry, and Social & Legal Studies) on the politics of reorganizing the labor and dispute processes in trial and appellate courts and in administrative agencies. Lawyers in a Postmodern World: Translation and Transgression (1994), with Maureen Cain, examines the role of lawyers and professional power in shaping American political development and state formation, as does Administrative Law and Politics (2000, 3rd ed.) with Lief Carter, and "Accounting for Accountability in Neoliberal Regulatory Regimes" (2006) with Ziya Umut Turem, in Dowdle, M. (ed.) Public Accountability: An Epistemic Mapping. She is currently writing about the cultural politics of rights as they materialize in global preservation movements, indigenous entitlement and reparation claims: Untouchable Entitlement (with Barbara Yngvesson), and completing a two volume work: The Constitution: Law, State and Society (with John Brigham). In addition to co-editing the "After the Law" Series published by Routledge, she is now, or has served on the editorial boards of two Australian sociolegal journals (Law in Context and Griffith Law Review) and several U.S. based journals (Law and Policy, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Crime, Law and Social Change, and Theoretical Criminology). Some of her work with the Law & Society Association includes: the Program Committee (1986) and the Board of Trustees (1984; 1991; 1996); and chairing the Summer Institute Committee (2002-04), the Graduate Student Workshop (1994), the Membership Committee (1996), the Nominations Committee (1996); and the Kalven Prize Committee (2006). She is also a Fellow at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati SPAIN. She has commuted between New York City and Amherst, MA for twenty years to be with her partner-in-sociolegal studies, John Brigham. Together they are raising Atticus, who at four months old attended his first LSA conference in Amsterdam. recently joined George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) as Associate Professor and founding Director of ICAR’s interdisciplinary undergraduate program. From 1990-2004, she taught and earned tenure at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s Studies Program. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Duke University in 1990. She has served on university-wide committees at both George Mason and Wesleyan. Specializing in legal anthropology, she focuses on conflict and culture, gender relations, discourse analysis, and the legal systems of East Africa and the Muslim world. Her book, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court, is an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of marital disputes in a Kenyan Muslim community. Fluent in the Swahili language, Susan has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania since 1985, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, Wesleyan University, and Duke University. She has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Wesleyan University’s Humanities Center, the American Bar Foundation, and Northwestern University’s Law and Social Science Program. She has served on the advisory panel of the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science Program and has twice participated on the Committee of Visitors that evaluates the LSS Program for NSF. Her earlier publications include Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance (co-edited with Mindie Lazarus-Black; Routledge, 1994) and numerous articles on law reform, gender and conflict, participatory research, and language in the disputing process, in edited volumes and journals, such as Law & Social Inquiry, Africa Today, and The Boston Review. She was the editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (1999-2002) and is currently on the editorial board of the American Ethnologist. Susan has just finished a book about the 1998 East African Embassy bombings and the subsequent trial of four defendants, written from her perspective as a bombings survivor and the widow of a victim. In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief, and a Victim’s Quest for Justice (forthcoming, Princeton University Press) is a reflexive ethnography of Susan’s experience at the embassy bombings trial in New York City in 2001 that, among other issues, narrates the difficulties she faced as death penalty opponent participating in a capital trial. Susan has spoken widely about terror trials, the U.S. death penalty, the roles of victims in legal processes and conflict resolution, and the contradictions of the current war on terror. She is pursuing new research on conflicts over Islamic law and on international legal responses to terrorism through, for example, the new International Criminal Court. Susan’s active participation in the Law and Society Association began in her graduate student days. She has served on many LSA committees including the Graduate Student Workshop Planning Committee (1989, 1990), Nominations Committee (1995), International Participation-Africa Committee (1994-6), International Activities Committee (2005-present), and the Program Planning Committees for the LSA Annual Meeting in 1993, 2001, 2005, and 2006. She was previously a Trustee of the Association (Class of 1994). is Professor of Anthropology and a faculty member of the Institute for Law and Society at New York University. She was previously Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College. Her current research explores how international human rights law is interpreted in China, India, Nigeria, and Peru, focusing in particular on women’s rights. Her most recent book, Human Rights and Gender Violence in the New World Order: Translating Culture, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2005. She has recently published articles on women's human rights, violence against women, and the process of localizing human rights. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. Her other books are Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation (co-edited with Neal Milner, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (Temple University Press, 1981). She is past-president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. She has served on the Board of Trustees in the past and on many committees of the Law and Society Association, including the Diversity Committee, the Membership Committee.Konstanze Plett teaches at the University of Bremen where she is affiliated with both the Law Department and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, serving as the Center’s director in her second 3-year term. She holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School (1988), and a Dr.iur. (equivalent to S.J.D.) from the University of Hamburg, Germany (1983). Before she joined the Bremen University law faculty, she was a senior research fellow at the Center for European Legal Policy at the University of Bremen (ZERP) for more than twenty years; on several occasions she was acting professor at Bremen University, and during the winter semester 2000-01 at the Humboldt University at Berlin. Her research interest concentrates on the interaction between social change and legal change, with a shift of the focus from access to law and dispute processing to civil and human rights in general, with special emphasis on the treatment of gender questions through the law. Currently, she is exploring the contribution of the law to the socio-cultural construction of gender, and the legal implications of gender binarisms, leading to the disregard of the rights of intersexed children, i.e., children born with ambiguous gender markers. A previous project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, investigated inconsistencies in the body of law by which women were affected in a different way than men, and to which she attributed the slow pace of achieving women’s equality as " law in action." Her publications in German include her doctoral dissertation, two co-authored books, one co-edited book, and numerous articles in journals and edited volumes. Her publications in English include Beyond Disputing: Exploring Legal Culture in Five European Countries (1991, co-edited with Catherine S. Meschievitz), and, most significant for her current research, "Gender and the Law" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001). Plett has taught classes on civil law, civil procedure, private international law, legal sociology and feminist legal theory. She has developed, and now teaches regularly, the introduction into law for non-law students as well as a program on Gender Studies which is offered both to students and as vocational training. She has served as a member of the editorial board of the legal quarterly Demokratie und Recht (1984-94), as co-president of the German lawyers guild (Vereinigung Demokratischer Juristinnen und Juristen, 1992-96), and in a focus group of the German Women Lawyers Association (Deutscher Juristinnenbund, 1997-8). She is a board member of the Section for the Sociology of Law of the German Sociological Associatiaon (Sektion Rechtssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, since 1992), and the German Socio-Legal Association (Vereinigung für Rechtssoziologie, since 2000). She has attended the Law & Society Association meetings since 1985, and served on several LSA committees, including the International Prize Committee (2001-02 and 2003-04), the Graduate Student Workshop (2003-04) and the Article Prize Committee (chair, 2004-05). She is the regional coordinator for Western Europe and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Law & Society Review (since 2004).
Mary Romero is a professor at Arizona State University where she teaches in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry and is the Director of Graduate Studies. She is the 2004 recipient of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Lee Founders Award. It is the highest award made by the Society for the Study of Social Problems for a career of activist scholarship. She is a former Carnegie Scholar, Pew National Fellowship for Carnegie Scholars, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She is the author of Maid in the U.S.A. (reissued as a Tenth Anniversary Edition 2002) and co-editor of numerous books: Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities (Blackwell 2005), Latina and Latino Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2002),and Women’s Untold Stories (Routledge, 1999), Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S. (Routledge 1997), and Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Class (Sage Publications, 1997). Her most recent articles are published in Critical Sociology, Villanova Law Review, Law & Society Review, British Journal of Industrial Relations, University of Cleveland Law Review DePaul Law Review, Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Denver University Law Review, and Harvard Educational Review. She currently serves on the international editorial board of Brill’s "Critical Studies in Social Science", the advisory board of Ethnic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Culture, Race & Ethnicity, National Review Board of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and is one of the managing editors of Clave: Counterdisciplinary Notes on Race, Power and the State. Since 1999, she has served on the Executive Board of LatCrit, Inc. and is currently the co-chair. Her research focuses on the unequal distribution of reproductive labor as a paid commodity and its role in reproducing inequality among families within countries and between nations. Embedded in feminist legal scholarship on caregiving, this research explores questions from a legal perspective: is work primarily an artifact of family law, or should it be examined through the lens of employment law? Her research also includes writings on social inequalities and justice that incorporate the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and citizenship and links the parallels between domestic gendered race relations and immigration and identifies the continuum between racism against citizens and racism against noncitizens
s a Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he has been a faculty member since 1993. He holds a JD from Yale Law School (1989) and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University (1994). From 1999 to 2001, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University, and in 2002-2003 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. Mark's research focuses on the legal environments of organizational activity in general, and on the legal environments of entrepreneurship and technological change in particular. He is currently completing a book on the role of law firms in Silicon Valley, and he is in the midst of a multi-year project on medical privacy and other "information governance" challenges in the health care sector. His 2003 Law and Society Review article, "The Contract as Social Artifact," received an honorable mention for the LSA's 2004 Article Prize. He has also written on corporate litigation ethics, on the organizational "internalization" of law, and on the relationship between economic and sociological explanations of legal phenomena. Mark has been an active participant in the Law and Society Association since 1987, serving on the Nominations Committee (1996), the Membership Committee (chair 2001; member 2002), the Didactic Workshop Committee (member 2000, chair 2003), and the Connections Committee (2003). Over the years, he has been particularly involved with the LSA Graduate Student Workshop, participating twice as a student (1987, 1992), once as an organizer (1999), and once as a faculty member (2004). He has also been a vocal advocate for law and society scholarship in other venues, most notably the American Sociological Association's section on the Sociology of Law, where he has run a new-faculty mentorship program since 2001 and where he will begin a term as chair in August 2005. In addition, he has served on the editorial board of Law & Social Inquiry (2000-2003), and at Wisconsin he chairs the Sociology Department's sub-committee in Deviance, Law and Social Control, and serves on the governing boards of the Institute for Legal Studies and the undergraduate Legal Studies Program.