LSA has announced its new President-Elect, Secretary and Class of 2023 Board of Trustees
AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association welcomes its new President Elect, Laura Beth Nielsen, Secretary, Eve Darian-Smith, and the Class of 2023 Board of Trustees, as the association announced the results of its 2020 elections on Tuesday. Every two years, LSA members vote for a new President and Secretary, while trustees are elected annually to serve three-year terms.
“This year’s voting results represent a wide variety of law & society scholars stretching across the globe and consisting of rich and diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds, training and experience,” said current LSA President Penelope Andrews. “Our incoming officers will not only contribute to the sustainability and viability of the LSA, but also demonstrate the importance of advancing the entire field of sociolegal studies through their own personal scholarship and achievements.”
Nielsen highlighted the group, becoming LSA’s 32nd president in 2021 and will start her term following the conclusion of the Annual Meeting. Nielsen currently chairs the Department of Sociology for Northwestern University, where her scholarship focuses on law’s capacity for social change. She studies legal consciousness and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender and class. Nielsen has edited three books and publishes in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, and leading law reviews.
A researcher for the American Bar Foundation, LSA has been Nielsen’s primary intellectual home since 1994, having served as Secretary (2011-13), a Trustee member (2001-04), Program Committee Chair (2004), Co-chair of the Graduate Student Workshop (2010 and 2013), Program Committee (2003) and Jacob Prize Chair (2020 and 2017). She has earned numerous LSA awards, including the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award (2018), Graduate Student Paper Prize (1999), Dissertation Prize (2000) and Article Prize (2002). Nielsen’s work and commentary has made its way into m many ss media outlets. She has received grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.
Darian-Smith extends her active involvement in LSA by becoming the Association’s next Secretary and will start her term in October, 2021. Serving as professor and chair in Global & International Studies for the University of California-Irvine, Darian-Smith has been committed to LSA since joining its community in 1991. She has served on the Board of Trustees three times and Executive Committee twice. Darian-Smith has demonstrated her passion for furthering diversity and encouraging the participation of minority and international scholars. As a member of LSA’s second Half Century Committee, she helped develop support for an African regional meeting.
Over the past three decades, Darian-Smith has consistently served on a host of LSA committees. Recently, she assisted in the submission of a National Science Foundation grant to enable scholars from low and middle-income countries to participate in the LSA 2022 international meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Darian-Smith’s interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on engaging human rights, legal pluralism, (post) colonialism, sociolegal theory and ethnographic methods. She won LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize (2000) and has published widely, including in the Routledge Handbook of Law and Society.
Each year, the LSA membership elects a class of eight individuals to serve on the Board of Trustees. The class of 2023 Trustees will include: Shaun Ossei-Owusu (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School) as the Class Representative, Fabio de Sa e Silva (University of Oklahoma), Rachel Moran (University of California-Irvine School of Law), Linda Mulcahy (University of Oxford), Ayobami Laniyonu (University of Toronto), Jeffrey Omari (Northern Illinois University College of Law), Matthew Shaw (Vanderbilt Law School) and Alison Renteln (University of Southern California).
LSA would like to thank its outgoing officers in Past President Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University), as well as the Class of 2020 Trustees for their hard work and dedication to the association. We also thank all of the candidates who agreed to stand for election and congratulations to all our new officers.