Trustees, Class of 2010

Trustees, Class of 2011

Sameer M. Ashar is Associate Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs at the City University of New York School of Law. He has a J.D. from Harvard Law School, has taught at New York University and the University of Maryland, and served as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts in New York. His scholarship is rooted in his clinical public interest practice, through which he has worked on litigation and policy campaigns with numerous worker centers and anti-deportation organizations in New York and Baltimore. His narrative of one such campaign, with low-wage restaurant workers, is the subject of “Public Interest Lawyers and Resistance Movements,” 95 California Law Review 1879 (2007) and is used to work through theoretical critiques of rights-based social change initiatives by critical legal and law and society scholars. The article suggests the outline of a role for public interest lawyers, linked to transnational workers’ movements, in a global and privatized political and economic context. In “Law Clinics and Collective Mobilization,” 14 Clinical Law Review 355 (2008), he deploys multiple campaign narratives to formulate an alternative clinical practice to that of the dominant forms which accentuate and promote the individualized and functionalized attributes of law practice. Both his current work on immigration enforcement and social control and his earlier work (“Immigration Enforcement and Subordination: The Consequences of Racial Profiling after September 11,” 34 Connecticut Law Review 1185 (2002)) on the impact of the race-conscious post-9/11 legal regime explore the relationships between lawyers, the state, private entities, and poor peoples movements. He has presented his work at annual meetings of the association as part of the Cause Lawyering CRN and the Program for International Socio-legal Collaboration. He is Chair-elect of the Law and Poverty Section of the Association of American Law Schools and a member of the Committee on Public Interest Lawyering of the AALS Clinical Section, which is focused on empirical research in clinical legal practice.

Mario L. Barnes is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, where he teaches in the areas of criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, national security and critical theories. Mario received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin, where he was a William H. Hastie Fellow. His research draws on both empirical studies and antidiscrimination theories to examine how legal doctrines facilitate subordination along multiple lines of identity. He has written about the potential synergies between sociolegal and critical theories and is working on a book that examines how legal experiences can encourage silence and acquiescence in response to the use of negative identity stereotypes in legal forums. He has been a member of the Law and Society Association since 2000, regularly attends annual meetings of the association, and participated in the Graduate Student Workshop in 2003. He has served as a member of the Program Committee (Baltimore 2006), Nominating Committee, and Diversity Committee, and he is the incoming Chair of the Diversity Committee. He has also served as a referee for Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the advisory board for the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at U.C. Berkeley. His past work has appeared in law journals at Wisconsin, U.C. Davis, Miami and Duke. His current work on identity performance and appearance discrimination (with Angela Onwuachi-Willig) is forthcoming in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.

Phoebe C. Ellsworth is the Frank Murphy Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Law at the University of Michigan. She received her A.B. from Harvard in Social Relations (1966) and her PhD from Stanford in Social psychology (1970). Her first job was at Yale, where she became a full professor in 1979, and later taught at Stanford before moving to the University of Michigan in 1987. She has been a member of the Law and Society Association since the beginning of her career, and served on the Board of Trustees from 1988 until 1991. Phoebe’s research has focused on jury decision-making, the death penalty, and the use of social science in law, with occasional forays into eyewitness identification, legal reasoning, and false convictions. She has published in social science journals (Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychologist, Psychological Science, Law and Human Behavior, Law and Society Review, and others) and in law reviews (Stanford, Michigan, Chicago-Kent), and has been cited in U. S. Supreme Court opinions (occasionally in majority opinions, more frequently in dissents). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the International Society for Research on Emotions. She has served on the advisory boards of the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health, the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Law and Social Science, the American Bar Foundation External Research review Board, and the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Death Penalty Information Center, the Advisory Board of the Center for Wrongful Convictions, and an International Review Panel for the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the Law and Society Association she has served on the Kalven Prize Committee (1988 and 2002), the program Committee for the 1991 meeting in Amsterdam, and the Nominating Committee (1998).

Valerie P. Hans is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she teaches courses on social science and law, jury systems, and torts. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Toronto. Her scholarly work and vision of the law and society enterprise have been deeply affected by her long-time participation as an active member of the Law & Society Association. Her work on juries and other forms of citizen participation in legal decision making has been enriched by the multidisciplinary and international connections made through the LSA. Her four books on the jury include, mostly recently, American Juries: The Verdict (2007, coauthored with Neil Vidmar). She is currently studying recent adoptions of new jury-like systems in a number of countries worldwide, inspired by law and society colleagues in the CRN she co-organizes on Lay Participation in Legal Decision making. In other work, two collections of essays she coedited, Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research (1998) and Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases (1998), were based on papers presented at the LSA Summer Training Institutes. She has served on the LSA annual conference’s Program Committee multiple times (co-chair, 2002 meeting), the Graduate Student Workshop (chair, 1998), the Organizing Committee for the Summer Training Institutes (1993-95), Secretary (1991-93), the Kalven Prize Committee (Chair, 2003-04), the 40^th Anniversary Campaign (2003-04), and other activities over the years. She was a Trustee in 1989-91.

Keith Hawkins is Professor Emeritus of Law and Society at Oxford University, Fellow Emeritus of Oriel College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics. His research is on the sociology of legal processes, and is concerned in particular with the interplay of legal rules and discretion in environmental and occupational health and safety regulation and in criminal justice. Among his publications are Environment and Enforcement; Regulation and the Social Definition of Pollution (Oxford University Press, 1984), The Uses of Discretion (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1992), and Law As Last Resort: Prosecution Decision-Making in a Regulatory Agency (Oxford University Press, 2002), which was awarded the Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize in 2003. He also has extensive editorial experience. He has been General Editor since 1993 of Oxford Socio-Legal Studies, published by Oxford University Press, and he edited Law & Policy for 25 years. He is a longstanding member of the Law and Society Association, having attended almost all of its conferences since the first regular meeting held in 1978. He was a Trustee of the Association 1981-1984, and has served as a member of various LSA committees (the 25th Anniversary Program Committee, 1988 89; the Didactic Workshops Committee, 1998-9; the Kalven Prize Committee, 2005-07; and the Program Committee 2007-08). Among other activities, he has held a number of teaching and research appointments in the USA, has been a member of the Research Committee of the American Bar Foundation for more than twenty years, and served two terms as a member of the Parole Board for England and Wales.

Frank Munger is Professor at New York Law School. He has been General Editor of the Law & Society Review, President of the Law and Society Association, Chair of the Section on Sociology of Law of the American Sociological Association, Chair of the Law and Social Sciences section of the American Association of Law Schools. Recent books include Laboring Below the Line: The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-wage Work, and Survival in the Global Economy (2002), a collection of essays by leading poverty scholars, economists, historians, and lawyers on the future of low-wage work and poverty in a globalizing economy, based on papers delivered at a conference he organized with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Lives of Americans with Disabilities (2003), is coauthored with Professor David Engel (SUNY Buffalo) and received the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Award in 2003. An earlier article coauthored by them, "Rights, Remembrance and the Reconciliation of Difference," published in the Law & Society Review, received the first annual Law and Society Article Award in 1997. Rights of Inclusion describes the subtle and informal influence of rights on the everyday lives of persons with disabilities. His most recent book, Law and Poverty (2006) is an edited collection of classic interdisciplinary essays intended as a resource for teachers and poverty scholars. He is currently writing a book about his empirical research on the effects devolution and privatization of welfare administration. He is also conducting fieldwork in Southeast Asia (Thailand) through interviews with lawyers, law teachers, and ordinary people about the impact of recent constitutional reforms and global pressure for legal change.

Lucy E. Salyer is an associate professor in the History Department of the University of New Hampshire. She earned her doctorate from the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, working under the guidance of Harry N. Scheiber. Her revised dissertation, published as Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigration and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), received the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Prize from the Immigration History Society. More recent publications include "Baptism by Fire: Military Service, Race and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918-1935," 91 Journal of American History (Dec. 2004): 847-876, which was awarded the Law & Society Association Article Prize in June 2005; “Wong Kim Ark and the Battle over Birthright Citizenship,” in Immigration Law Stories (Foundation Press, 2005); and “Chew Heong v. United States: Chinese Exclusion and the Federal Courts,” in Teaching Judicial History: Federal Trials and Great Debates in U.S. History, (Federal Judicial Center, 2006). She has completed a history of the California Supreme Court between 1910 and 1940 and is currently working on a socio-legal history of citizenship policies in the 19th and 20th century entitled "Pledging Allegiance: The Troubled History of American Citizenship." She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. Salyer served on the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize committee for the Law and Society Association in 2003 and 2006. She has also been active in the American Society for Legal History, completing a three-year term on its Board of Directors and currently serving on the Membership Committee and the editorial board of Law and History Review. Salyer has lead several workshops on legal history and immigration history for secondary school teachers, sponsored by the Federal Judicial Center and the U.S. Department of Education’s “Teaching American History” program.

Leti Volpp is a Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she is also an affiliated faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, Women’s Studies, and the Institute for Governmental Studies’ Center on the Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a M.Sc. in Legal Studies from the University of Edinburgh, a M.Sc. from the Harvard School of Public Health, and an A.B. from Princeton University. Her research focuses upon the intersection of citizenship, culture, migration and identity. She is the editor (with Mary Dudziak) of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She has also authored numerous articles in journals including Theoretical Inquiries in Law, PMLA, Citizenship Studies, Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. Before joining the faculty of UC Berkeley, she worked as a public interest lawyer primarily focused on immigrants’ rights and then joined the faculty of the American University, Washington College of Law (Assistant Professor 1998-2001, Associate Professor 2001-2004, Professor 2004-2005). She was a Visiting Professor at UCLA Law School in 2004-2005. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships and the AALS Minority Section Derrick Bell Award. She is currently Chair of the Immigration Section of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the National Council of the American Studies Association, a member of the International Committee of Nouvelles Questions Féministes, and an Associate of the Research Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths College, London.