Lee Cabatingan (JD UC Hastings, 2003; PhD U Chicago, 2015) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, critical legal geography, and law. Her research interests include post-colonial law and legal systems, questions of sovereignty, and the making of property, as well as socialist legal contexts and research methods, particularly as they are uniquely used in law-related settings. Cabatingan has studied the role of legal actors and the constitution of new courts in the reshaping of Caribbean society and has examined the sociolegal foundations to and implications of major disasters, such as hurricanes.

Professor Cabatingan currently sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and she recently co-edited a Special Issue, also for PoLAR, dedicated to “Property and the Matter of Belonging.” She has co-edited (with Susan Coutin and Deyanira Martinez Nevarez) a volume dedicated to exploring ethnographic practices in legal contexts (Routledge 2024) and a volume (with Robert Nelson and James Heckman) offering global perspectives on the rule of law (Routledge 2010). She has reviewed articles for a number of journals, including Law and Society Review, Punishment and Society, PoLAR, American Ethnologist, and American Anthropologist and has reviewed book manuscripts for The University of Chicago Press. She has previously served as a committee member on the Law and Society Association’s Junior Scholars Workshop, in addition to organizing multiple panels for Law and Society Annual Meetings. Cabatingan is currently a member of the Law, Society, and Culture Graduate Student Emphasis steering committee at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also co-director of both the Law and Ethnography Lab (with Susan Coutin) and the Sociolegal Studies Workshop (with Swethaa Ballakrishnen).