What is New Legal Realism?

Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and the University of Connecticut School of Law. He has authored or edited 11 books on transitional justice, truth and reconciliation commissions, and international criminal tribunals. His latest book is Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes. He serves on the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut, and he is currently working on a book about the challenge of investigating and prosecuting bias 16 motivated crimes in the United States titled, “United Against Hate? The Nonenforcement of Hate Crime Laws.”

In the latest NLR episode, Professor Wilson discusses his current research on the enforcement of hate crimes statutes in the US, his methodological approach, translating research to policy, how his work connects with NLR, and teaching.

Amy Cohen is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. Reinstein Chair in law. Before joining Temple, she was the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law at The Ohio State University and Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney, where she remains involved in collaborative research projects as an honorary professor. Professor Cohen holds a BA, summa cum laude, from Rutgers University and a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

Professor Cohen’s research focuses on two areas of sociolegal scholarship—informal justice, including among people building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. She has taught a range of classes including property law, family law, mediation, negotiation, international dispute resolution, law and development, food law, and experimentalist legal theory. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Turin Faculty of Law, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. She has also held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the Collegio Carlo Alberto. She used several of these fellowships to develop a multi-year project on smallholder farmers and economic justice in India. 

In this episode, Professor Cohen discusses her research, methodological approaches, translating her research to policy changes in the world, and her connection with NLR.

John Bliss is an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and an affiliate faculty member at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession where he previously spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow. Before joining the Denver Law faculty, he completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.

Professor Bliss’ research empirically examines the relationship between lawyers’ professional identities and their public-interest values. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative analysis, he has studied how law students adopt professional selves while “drifting” away from initial aspirations to work in public-interest practice settings. He also takes this inquiry further into lawyers’ careers, examining civic professionalism among young lawyers in the U.S. and China, pro bono in large law firms, and movement lawyering in the contexts of fair housing, animal rights, and the protection of future generations. His work is published or forthcoming in leading legal and interdisciplinary outlets, including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Wisconsin Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, and edited volumes on global pro bono and the emerging Chinese bar.

In this podcast, Professor Bliss discusses his research, the methods he uses, how he is translating the results of his work into policy changes, and how his research fits in the NLR tradition.

Alexandra Huneeus is the Evjue Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her PhD, JD and BA from University of California, Berkeley, and was a post-doc at Stanford University’s Center on Development, Democracy and the Rule of Law. Professor Huneeus’s scholarship focuses on international law and human rights, with emphasis on Latin America.  Her work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Law and Social Inquiry, Yale Journal of International Law, Leiden International Law Journal, and by Cambridge University Press.

In 2017, Professor Huneeus was named to serve a ten-year term as Foreign Expert Jurist in the Colombian Jurisdicción para la Paz (JEP), a court created as part of the Colombian peace process. At UW, Professor Huneeus currently serves as Director of the Center for Law, Society and Justice. She is Co-Chair of the University of Wisconsin Human Rights Program, which she co-founded, and Director of the Global Legal Studies Program.

In 2019 she was awarded the best paper prize by the International Society of Public Law. In 2013, she was awarded the American Association for Law Schools Scholarly Papers Prize, as well as the American Society for Comparative Law Award for Younger Scholars (for two different articles), and in 2014 she was awarded an NSF grant to explore the impact of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on domestic prosecutions of state atrocity.  More recently, Professor Huneeus has opened a new line of research around legal innovations in Latin America around the environment and the law. 

Deepa Das Acevedo is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law.  In addition to being a legal anthropologist, she is a Trustee of the Law & Society Association (Class of 2024), an Associate Editor for the Law & Society Review, a Contributing Editor to the Work Law section of JOTWELL, and a member of the advisory board for Law & Social Inquiry. Professor Acevedo’s research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights about legal rules and institutions.  In addition to her work on the law and politics in India, Professor Acevedo studies employment regulation in the gig economy, and is exploring methodological and theoretical developments in the anthropology of law.  Professor Acevedo is currently working on a monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala, about the dispute over gender equality and religious freedom involving the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, India.  Her edited volume, Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.  In this podcast, Professor Acevedo discusses her recent research, the challenges of being an interdisciplinary scholar, and how her research fits within the New Legal Realism movement.

This episode presents an interview with Professors Riaz Tejani and Emily Taylor Poppe, who recently became co-chairs of the Law and Society Association’s New Legal Realism Collaborative Research Network (CRN). Recorded in advance of the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Tejani and Taylor Poppe discuss the panels sponsored this year by the NLR CRN as well as their plans for the CRN going forward. In addition, they each share how NLR perspectives have informed their research agendas and their teaching in different institutional contexts. Coming from different disciplinary and methodological traditions—Tejani is an anthropologist and ethnographer and Taylor Poppe is a sociologist who relies primarily on quantitative analyses—they reaffirm NLR’s commitment to incorporating diverse social science perspectives into our understanding of law and legal institutions. Having benefitted from the mentorship and examples of other more senior NLR scholars, they reaffirm the CRN’s commitment to providing a space for NLR scholars.  

Season two of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars.  This third episode presents an interview with Professor Shauhin Talesh, who has recently co-edited a book with Elizabeth Mertz and Heinz Klug titled Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism.  In this podcast, he explains how NLR fits within his pathbreaking work on how private organizations shape and influence the content and meaning of legislation and regulation.  In particular, he discusses how private organizations respond to legal regulations and what impact such responses have on civil and consumer rights in terms of procedural justice and substantive fairness.  Recognized internationally as one of the leading scholars on law, organizations, and compliance, Talesh is a prominent voice in a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars that explore theoretically informed empirical questions and translate social, economic and political contexts using multiple methods into an understanding of law.  His impact in law and social science journals and traditional law reviews is a model for scholars interested in using ground up social-science research to answer not just important legal questions but to inform policy debates in society.  In addition to discussing his research agenda, Talesh highlights in this podcast the core components of the new Modern Legal Realism handbook and how faculty in law schools and legal studies programs can also incorporate NLR into teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Season 2 of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars.  This second episode presents an interview with Professor Bernadette Atuahene, who has written about New Legal Realism movement in an article in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.  In this podcast, she explains how NLR fits with her pathbreaking work on property rights in South Africa and in Detroit.  She is featured in the upcoming Research Handbook of Modern Legal Realism (2021) as a “Llewellyn and Mentschikoff” figure of today’s realism because of her work combining theory, empirical research, and legal reform.  Indeed, she went further in proving the law-and-society research on legal mobilization right, recognizing that legal reform alone would not work, but must go hand-in-hand with ground-level partnerships to help lower-income homeowners illegally deprived of their houses. She exemplifies the NLR ideal in using ground-level-up social science research to make a real impact on people’s lives through law.

Season 2 of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars, kicking off with April Faith-Slaker’s interview of Thomas Mitchell.  Professor Mitchell is a leading figure in the New Legal Realism movement, from the inaugural Wisconsin Law Review NLR Symposium in 2005, to the signal edited NLR volumes from Cambridge University Press in 2016.  He is featured in the upcoming Research Handbook of Modern Legal Realism (2021) as a “Llewellyn and Mentschikoff” figure of today’s realism because of his work combining legal theory, empirical research, and policy/doctrinal reform aimed at remedying black land loss in rural areas.  In October 2020, Mitchell received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of this pathbreaking work. 

In the fourth episode of our NLR podcast series, April Faith-Slaker talks with Stewart Macaulay (Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School) and Elizabeth Mertz (Senior Research Faculty at the American Bar Foundation and Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Wisconsin Law School).  Macaulay and Mertz are co-editors (with Thomas W. Mitchell) of The New Legal Realism, Vol. I: Translating Law-and-Society for Today’s Legal Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016).  In this podcast, they discuss the law and society and new legal realism movements as well as new legal realism in legal education and the challenges of integrating law and social science.