AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is pleased to announce the newest Michele Bratcher Fellows in Law and Society: Chloé Sudduth (Rutgers University – Newark) and Natalia Niedmann Álvarez (University of Chicago). The Fellows Program launched in 2025 with the goal of deepening graduate student engagement in the Association’s work and meeting planning, while facilitating meaningful professional development and mentorship opportunities.
For their two-year term as Fellows (2026 – 2028), Chloé and Natalia will join 2025 cohort members Kia Turner and Vicente Celestino Mata, Jr. on the LSA Global Meeting Program Committee. Kia and Vicente will mentor Chloé and Natalia as they help to review submissions, assist with panel formation, and participate in other committee work. They will also receive a $2,000 annual stipend, as well as $750 to offset travel to the 2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Hong Kong.
Chloé Sudduth is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University – Newark whose work sits at the intersection of digital technologies, law, and punishment. Specifically, her work investigates how emerging data-driven and algorithmic technologies transform systems of social classification and institutional governance, with particular attention to how these transformations reshape inequality and access to essential social resources. Her dissertation examines algorithmic tenant screening tools as both technical systems and cultural artifacts to illuminate how digital technologies are reshaping access to housing and reorganizing the production and governance of inequality. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and as the Director of Advocacy at the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless where she worked with people navigating increasingly digitized legal and administrative systems. Today, she co-leads and coordinates events for the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Collective and is a member of the Law and Society Association and the American Society of Criminology. Sudduth was also a recent ABF/JPB Access to Justice Early-Career Scholar. She holds an M.A. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University and a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and Public Policy from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Natalia Niedmann Álvarez is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago whose main research interests are legal history, American history, and feminist theory. Her dissertation narrates feminist organizations’ attempts to bring about social change through a history of NOW (America’s largest feminist organization), and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (its Chicana counterpart). Her project argues that American “state-feminists” creatively mobilized the law to bring about the world they envisioned, while their embeddedness in a changing political economy conditioned their political imaginaries. Natalia graduated from Law School at Universidad de Chile in her hometown, Santiago and has been admitted to the Chilean bar since 2017. She holds an LL.M. and J.S.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and has been a Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School. She has been a member of LSA since 2023 and is currently a founder/co-coordinator of LSA’s Global Social Reproduction Network.
Each fall, LSA will select two new fellows to serve a two-year term. If you are a current student and interested in applying to be a future fellow, keep an eye out for the call for applications in Late Summer/Early Fall.