The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its new President-Elect, Secretary-Elect, and Class of 2029 Board of Trustees!
Dee Smythe has been elected LSA President-Elect. Her term as President-Elect begins immediately, and she will assume the presidency at the close of the 2027 Global Meeting.
Dee Smythe is Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Cape Town, a Research Scholar at the Centro de Investigação e Desenvolvimento sobre Direito e Sociedade (CEDIS) at Nova School of Law in Lisbon, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at New York Law School. She holds JSD and JSM degrees from Stanford Law School and a BA in Political Science and LLB from the University of Cape Town. She is based in Lisbon, Portugal.
Dee has been an active LSA member for more than two decades, serving the Association in a range of leadership and committee roles. In 2021 she was appointed as the inaugural Coordinator of Global Activities (2021–2024), the first person to hold this role, with responsibility for developing and implementing LSA’s international strategy. She co-chaired the Program Committee (with Pierre Guibentif and Michele Goodwin) for the 2022 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, which drew nearly 3,000 scholars from across the world and substantially expanded co-sponsorship of the meeting to global sociolegal associations, including in Latin America and Africa. Dee has served on the Board of Trustees (Class of 2023); as Co-Chair of the International Activities Committee (with David Trubek, 2019–2021); on the Programme Committee for the 2017 Global Meeting in Mexico City and the Joint LSA-RCSL Global Outreach Committee for that Meeting; the Membership and Professional Issues Committee; the Dissertation Prize Committee; and the Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop Committee. In 2020 she co-chaired the Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop with Mark Massoud. Dee was a co-PI on the National Science Foundation grant that funded LSA’s International Research Collaboratives (IRCs) between 2021 and 2023.
Mark Fathi Massoud has been elected LSA Secretary-Elect. His term will begin in October 2027.
Mark Fathi Massoud is professor of politics and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies how people build and destroy nations, why and how they create legal systems, and why religion matters in politics.
Massoud is professionally active in the field of law and society, having served as a trustee of the Law and Society Association, co-chair of the 2026 Program Committee for the LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, co-chair of the LSA Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop Committee, and chair of the LSA Publications Committee. He has also served as an editorial board member of Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, The International Journal of Law in Context, and Law & Policy. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society book series with Cambridge University Press.
Each year, LSA members elect a new class of eight Trustees to serve a three-year term on the Board. The representative with the most votes will serve as their class representative on the Executive Committee. We are proud to announce this year’s newly elected Trustees:
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine
Leiden University
Toyo University
University of Michigan
University of California, Berkeley
Skidmore College
To learn more about LSA leadership, click here.