Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) play a vital role within the Law and Society Association’s broader intellectual communities. CRNs provide a platform for LSA members to connect, exchange ideas, and collaborate with other scholars who share common interests. Through these networks, members not only organize sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting but also develop cross-disciplinary and cross-national research projects. CRNs help build deeper intellectual and professional connections among scholars, helping build a stronger sense of community within LSA and encouraging meaningful research collaborations.
CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope.
For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 9: Law and Health.
When University of Utah Professor Leslie Francis first encountered the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network 9: Law and Health, she was immediately hooked.
“Law and Society has been ‘where I found my people’ in the legal academy,” she explains.
Her “people,” the members of CRN 9, are legal scholars in health law, public health, health care, human rights and health, medical sociology, medical anthropology, disability studies, health politics, and related fields. They come from all over the world—most notably the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and South and Central America—and bring with them a variety of different research approaches, from empirical and theoretical to comparative and even aesthetic. These days, Professor Francis co-chairs CRN 9 alongside Dorit Reiss (UC Law San Francisco) and Allison Whelan (Georgia State University). Professor Reiss studies vaccines in relation to torts, administrative law, and public health, while Allison Whelan studies topics related to reproductive justice, bioethics, the FDA, administrative law, and constitutional law.
“It’s a big tent!” she acknowledges—and that’s exactly the point. Throughout her career, Professor Francis has learned firsthand how intellectually diverse environments can add depth and breadth to one’s research. As a graduate student, she attended the University of Michigan, one of the few institutions with a joint program for studying law and philosophy, and she now holds appointments in both fields. One of her most frequent collaborators, University of Utah political scientist John Francis, is also her husband. But Professor Francis’ circumstances remain somewhat unique; while crossover programming adjacent to the legal academy has grown over the years, law schools, for the most part, have not yet embraced the practice. What’s more, law faculty often contend with various forms of isolation—physical isolation, with many law departments dwelling on far-flung corners of campus, or different campuses altogether, and intellectual isolation fostered by law schools’ intense focus on US News and World Report accreditation and the production of legal practitioners rather than advancing legal scholarship.
“If you do health law, you’re going to work for a health care company,” says Professor Francis, illustrating the academy’s thought-process.
CRN 9’s seemingly unwieldy scope is manageable due to the group’s shared focus on social change, which grounds them and provides the basis for fruitful intellectual collaboration and connection. Sometimes, this exchange occurs in formal settings like the LSA Annual Meeting, where recent panels on abortion, reproductive rights, and other controversial forms of healthcare have attracted diverse academic audiences. Other times, informal conversation at CRN 9’s dinner and cocktail parties, over the CRN listserv, or through personal correspondence with friends made through the network leave indirect impacts that inevitably inform the members’ scholarly work.
For Professor Francis and many other CRN 9 members, getting to the root cause—and exploring the impact—of social issues, such as limited reproductive health access for women, is essential to the struggle for social justice. Their findings, after all, can inform decision-making by advocates, policy makers, and the general public. Professor Whelan’s recent article on the destabilizing impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on clinical research, for instance, provides important information for people invested in safe medical care for pregnant persons and fetuses, especially those who already face health disparities, as well as potential approaches to combatting these effects. Professor Reiss’ work on vaccine law, which she has recently spoken about with outlets such as The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR, provides an important counter-narrative to nonscientific information from the United States federal government. Through her research and interactions with the public, she has been able to sound the alarm about the deadly implications of vaccine policy changes under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, such as public health layoffs, cuts to research funding, and the proliferation of misinformation that influences private decision-making. Critically, she has also used her voice to suggest possible ways to mitigate negative impacts in the immediate future, encouraging state governments to supplement funding and policy gaps within their jurisdictions and medical associations to continue publishing data and scientifically sound guidance.
CRN 9 offers more than just intellectual expansion and a space for social inquiry, however. Recent political upheavals in the United States and around the world have presented existential challenges for social scientists, whose work is often suppressed and/or ignored in favor of political decisions that somehow make things even worse for vulnerable communities.
CRN 9’s scholarly community ensures that members don’t have to face these challenges alone. This is especially important for junior scholars, who face the disadvantage of entering the field under the most volatile conditions in recent memory. Through their involvement in CRN 9, and LSA more broadly, young academics are able to stave off the effects of structural, cultural, and intellectual isolation by developing interdisciplinary relationships early in their careers.
“I’m personally not isolated because I’m in two departments, and because I have a life partner in a third, but my law life is isolated,” Professor Francis says. “And Law and Society is a way, in the more general academic space, to address that.”
“I think the CRN has been a source of people feeling supported by one another in the work they do.”