Trustees

Elizabeth Heger Boyle is Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the role global culture plays in the construction of local and national actors, and she studies this in the context of women's and children's rights. Her publications appear in Law & Society Review and Law & Social Inquiry, among other outlets. Liz teaches the Sociology of Law, and Sociology of International Law, and is actively involved in advising graduate students. She is strongly committed to interdisciplinary perspectives on law, and has been a member of the Law and Society Association since the early 1990's. She served on the Board of Trustees from 2002-2004 and as the Law & Society Review Book Review Editor from 2004-2007. Liz has also chaired or served on numerous committees for LSA; she is currently on the 2011 Program Committee. Liz received a J.D. from the University of Iowa in 1987, practiced law for a few years, and then returned to school at Stanford University, where she received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1996.

Susan Bibler Coutin is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Criminology, Law and Society University of California, Irvine, where she is also Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. She holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Stanford University. Her research has examined social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. She is the author of The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement (Westview Press, 1993), Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States. (Cornell University Press, 2007). She is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Re/Membering the Nation that analyzes interviews with 1.5 generation Salvadorans in order to explore the power and limitations of nation-based categories of membership. She was founding director of the UCI Center in Law, Society and Culture, and is currently president-elect of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. She has been very active in the Law and Society Association, having served as a trustee (2001-2004), Program Committee member (2007-2008, 1999-2000, 1997-1998), Law & Society Review Book Review Editor Search Committee Chair (2003), Citizenship and Immigration Collaborative Research Network Coordinator (1999-2005), Conditions of Work Committee chair (2000-2001) and member (2001-2002), Nominations Committee member (2007, 2004), International Meetings Planning Committee member (1998-1999), International Affairs Committee member (2005), and member of various LSA prize committees (2009-2001, 2008-2009, 1998-1999). She has also served on National Science Foundation Law and Social Science review panels.

Eve Darian-Smith is Professor in the Global & International Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a LLB from the University of Melbourne, and a MA (Harvard) and PhD (Chicago) in socio-cultural anthropology. She has been an active member of the Law & Society Association for many years, and is committed to furthering diversity within its membership and encouraging the participation of minority and international scholars. She served as the chair of LSA’s Summer Institute in 1999 and 2007, writing successful NSF grants on both occasions to support these programs, and in 2010 she chaired the Early Career Workshop. She has also served as a member of various committees (Nominations Committee 1998; Herbert Jacob Book Prize Committee 2001, 2002; Summer Institute Planning Committee 1997, 2005-8; International Scholar Committee 2009). Over the past two years she has, with Nick Buchanan, launched a new LSA Collaborative Research Network on Law and Indigeneity. Her research engages with issues of legal pluralism and is empirically grounded in the reality of peoples’ everyday lives and practices. Her first book, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe, was the co-winner of the Herbert Jacob Book Prize in 2000. Subsequent books include Laws of the Postcolonial (with Peter Fitzpatrick), New Capitalists: Law, Politics and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land (2003), and most recently Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Anglo-American Law (2010). She is currently finishing a book titled Laws and Societies: Contemporary Issues/Global Approaches (Cambridge). She has been on the editorial boards of a number of sociolegal journals including Studies in Law, Politics and Society; American Ethnologist; Social and Legal Studies; Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Law & Social Inquiry; Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and she is a former associate editor of the Law & Society Review.

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was President of the American Sociological Association in 2006 and President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 1983.She has been a member of the Law & Society Association since 1988. She is known particularly for her studies of women in the legal profession. Her book, Women in Law (1981; Revised second edition, 1993) was one of the first to explore the subject. She is also known for her studies of glass ceiling issues (“Glass Ceilings and Open Doors: Women’s Advancement in the Legal Profession,” Fordham Law Review 1995) and part-time work (with Carroll Seron, Robert Sauté and Bonnie Oglensky, The Part-Time Paradox). She has had grants from the Atlantic Philanthropies, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Sloan Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The National Institutes of Mental Health, and the Professional Staff Congress of the City University as well as other agencies. Epstein has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the MacDowell Colony and has been a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School and Columbia Law School. She was Resident Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation for six years. In addition, she was a White House appointee to the Committee on the Economic Role of Women to the Council of Economic Advisors and an advisor to the White House on Affirmative Action. Epstein has been the chair of three sections of the ASA and on the Council of others including the Sociology of Law. In addition to the books noted above, Epstein’s publications include: Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life (Russell Sage, 2004); The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (Routledge, 1999); Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order, (Yale University Press 1988), Access to Power: Cross?National Studies of Women and Elites (1981); The Other Half: Roads to Women's Equality (1971); and Woman's Place: Options and Limits on Professional Careers (1970); as well as over 100 articles and book chapters. She is at work on a book about law students’ choice of careers in the public interest.

Hiroshi Fukurai is Professor of Legal Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research explores a potential utility of lay adjudication in order to create an effective deterrent and investigative mechanism against governmental abuse of power. His numerous books, articles and op-ed pieces reflect his research on the importance of lay adjudication. In the U.S., his research calls for the establishment of a federal civil grand jury to promote civic investigation of unethical and possibly criminal misconduct of the U.S. government and its officials ("Dick Cheney's Indictment Signals Need for a Federal Civil Grand Jury" in UCSC/News & Events, 2008; and "The Proposal to Establish the System of the Federal Civil Grand Jury in America" at the 2008 LSA Conference). Outside the U.S., his research calls for the establishment of the jury and other lay participatory systems in Asia, Africa, and Central/South America (“Is Mexico Ready for a Jury Trial? Comparative Analysis of Lay Justice Systems in Mexico, the U.S., Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Ireland" in Mexican Law Journal (2010); "The Rebirth of Japan's Petit Quasi-jury and Grand Jury Systems" in Cornell International Law Journal (2008); “Civic Participatory Systems in China and Japan” in the Special Issue of the International Journal of Law, Crime, and Justice (2011, coauthored with Zhuoyu Wang); and "Saiban-in Seido (Lay Assessor's System), Kensatsu Shinsakai (Prosecutorial Review Commission (PRC)), Okinawa's Quest for Self-Determination and Political Sovereignty" in Okinawan Journal of American Studies (2009)). At present, he is examining lay adjudication of military crimes in Japan, Korea, and other nation-states with substantial military installations (“People’s Panels v. Imperial Hegemony” in Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal (2010, forthcoming); “Deterrence against military crimes in Okinawa, Japan” in Okinawa Times (June 3, 2010); “Lay adjudication of military crimes” in Mainichi Shimbun (June 25, 2010); and “Jury Trial of U.S. Soldier in Okinawa” in Korea Herald (June 8, 2010)). His four books are indicative of his commitment to adjudicative justice and equality in law; Race in the Jury Box: Affirmative Action in Jury Selection (2003), Anatomy of the McMartin Child Molestation Case (2001), Race and the Jury: Racial Disenfranchisement and the Search for Justice (1993, Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Award), and Common Destiny: Japan and the U.S. in the Global Age (1990). His scholarly work on civic legal participation and its democratizing effects has been deeply affected by his long-time engagement as a jury consultant in critically evaluating racial and class compositions of lay participants in American courts. His multidisciplinary and collaborative research was further inspired by American and international colleagues in the Law and Society Association (LSA), especially in two Collaborative Research Networks (CRN) on “Lay Participation in Legal Decision Making” and “East Asian Law and Society.” He has been serving on the LSA editorial board for the Law & Society Review, helped co-organize the East Asian Law and Society CRN, and was one of three organizers to hold the Inaugural East Asian Law and Society Conference in Hong Kong in February 2010, in which nearly 160 participants gathered from the U.S., Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, Iran, England, Germany, and other nations in the world. He is currently serving as a co-editor of two edited book volumes and two special issues of law and criminology journals in the publication of papers presented at the Hong Kong Conference. He is also one of key organizers of the Second East Asian Law and Society Conference to be held in Seoul, South Korea in September 2011.

Tom Ginsburg is Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a visiting fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where he co-directs the Center on Law and Globalization. He is a graduate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he also holds B.A. and J.D. degrees. A member of the Law and Society Association since 1994, he was on the planning committee of the East Asia CRN’s inaugural meeting in Hong Kong earlier this year and is eager to further internationalize the LSA. His recent co-authored book, The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), won the best book award from Comparative Democratization Section of APSA. His other books include Administrative Law and Governance in Asia (2008), Rule By Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (with Tamir Moustafa, 2008), Institutions and Public Law (2005) and Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003). He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an NSF-funded data set cataloging the world’s constitutions since 1789.

Mary Rose received an A.B. in Psychology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Duke University. Formerly a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, she is currently an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses on social science and law as well as social psychology and research methods. Her research examines lay participation in the legal system and perceptions of justice, and she has written on a variety of topics including the effects of jury selection practices on jury representativeness and citizens’ views of justice, jury trial innovations, civil damage awards, and public views of court practices. She is also an investigator on the landmark study of decision making among 50 deliberating juries from Pima County, Arizona. In 2005, her research on the peremptory challenge was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Miller-el v. Dretke (Breyer, J., concurring) and her work on punitive damages was cited in the 2008 decision Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker. She has been on the editorial boards of Law & Social Inquiry and the Law & Society Review and has previously served the Law & Society Association through work on the student awards committee (’04), the program committee (’05, ’08), the ad hoc committee on Annual Meeting Innovation (’10), and as a Trustee for the class of 2006.

Ronen Shamir is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He has been chairperson of his department (2007-2010), a co-founder of Israeli Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Social Research. An active member of LSA since 1990, he has served as member and chair on various committees, the Board of Trustees (class of 1999), and as an instructor in the Association's Graduate Student Workshop and its Summer Institute. His publications include Managing Legal Uncertainty (1995) and The Colonies of Law (2000) and articles in the Law & Society Review and many other sociological and socio-legal journals. He spent time teaching and conducting research in the American Bar Foundation and in countries such as Spain and Turkey. His research in the past concerned the socio-legal aspects of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, the colonial legal legacy of Israel/Palestine, cause-lawyering in various settings, and the American legal profession during the New Deal. In the past few years he has studied the phenomenon of 'corporate social responsibility', using case-studies for assessing the meaning and impact of voluntary and private regulation. He is currently conducting archival research, studying the electrification of Jaffa and Tel Aviv in the 1920s, relying on actor-network theory for describing the relationship between law, hardware, electrical light, and everyday life and their effects on the development of the region.