Laura Beth Nielsen is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University.  She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (Ph.D. 1999) and Boalt Hall School of Law (J.D. 1996). 

Laura Beth is one of 5 co-PIs on the NSF and ABF grants (totaling nearly $500,000) which support the Law and Society Association’s newly established doctoral scholarship and mentoring training grants which she administers over the next 5 years.  She is the winner of the Law and Society Association’s graduate student article prize, dissertation prize, and best article prize.  She served on the LSA’s Board of Trustees (2001-2004) and as the Program Chair for LSA’s annual meeting (2004); she is on the council of the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, and served as an editor of Law & Social Inquiry for five years.

Her primary field is the sociology of law, with particular interests in legal consciousness and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class.  Her first monograph, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech, (Princeton University Press, 2004) studies hate speech, targets’ reactions and responses to it, and attitudes about using law to deal with such speech.  She has co-edited three books about rights in general and employment civil rights in particular including Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Rights, (Ashgate, 2007) and Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research:  Rights and Realities, (with Robert L. Nelson, Springer, 2005); and New Civil Rights Research:  A Constitutive Approach (with Ben Fleury-Steiner, Ashgate 2006).

In addition, she is the author of numerous articles published in the UCLA Law Review, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, Stanford Journal of Law and Policy, and the Wisconsin Law Review.