research

Dissertation

My dissertation examines the institutional rise of pro bono practice in large law firms. Over the past few decades, pro bono practice has undergone dramatic changes in how it is structured and has increasingly become institutionalized throughout the legal profession, especially within law schools and large law firms. Good empirical studies of these changes in pro bono behavior are lacking. The few studies that do exist tend to focus on characteristics of individual lawyers and largely consist of surveys that aim to understand the motivations and constraints toward pro bono participation. A central argument of my dissertation is that individual participation is rooted in the organizational and institutional context of the law firm and not due to the individual characteristics of lawyers.

With the institutionalization of pro bono practice as a backdrop, I examine large law firms' pro bono practices along two dimensions. First, I analyze large firm commitment in terms of hours between 1993 and 2005 for the top 200 firms in the United States. Specifically, I examine a variety of organizational and institutional factors that predict how much time a firm commits to its pro bono practice. This component of the dissertation contributes to institutional theory by explicitly analyzing behavior on the ground in order to understand if processes of institutionalization have real effects. Second, I analyze the scope of pro bono representation. Through a cross-sectional analysis of the inter-organizational relationships between a sample of large firms and their pro bono clients, I analyze the distribution of organizations that are represented and the organizational and institutional factors that predict these relationships. In addition to the quantitative analyses, I am conducting interviews with large firm managers in order to contextualize contemporary pro bono practices. These interviews provide insight into how law firm actors structure their pro bono practice and the processes through which they decide to work with specific organizations.

My dissertation has received funding and intellectual support from the National Science Foundation, the Law Firms Working Group, the Center for Law, Society and Culture, and the Center for Organizational Research at UCI.

In addition to my dissertation, I have several ongoing research projects in the areas of law, social movements, globalization, and sexuality.

Law and Social Movements

In one paper (with David Meyer), we argue that social movements have increasingly relied on legal strategies tied to litigation, which has become problematic in an era of legal conservatism and has implications for grassroots mobilization. This paper has been published by Perspectives on Politics. Download Here

In another project, I analyze the gay rights movement following a legal defeat and the agentic work of activists in using the negative legal decision to mobilize their constituents. This paper builds on research in political opportunities to argue that defeats can also be mobilizing for movements, and that the central mediating process between structural opportunities and mobilization on the ground is the strategic decisions of activists.

Finally, in another project (with J. Craig Jenkins and Nella Van Dyke), we analyze white supremacist mobilization between 1947 and 1997. We argue that white supremacists mobilize due to political threats, such as civil rights mobilization, and northern Democratic power, and not due to economic and demographic threats, which continues to be the dominant explanation for conservative mobilization.

Law, Sexuality, and Globalization

Currently, I am engaged in two related projects (with David John Frank and Bayliss Camp) that examine international legal change around the criminal regulation of sex. The first paper examines the dramatic decriminalization of sodomy from an institutional perspective. This paper is forthcoming (Fall 2009) as a chapter in an edited volume on lesbian and gay social movements and law being published by NYU Press. In this paper, we argue that the case-dominated literature in sexuality studies tends to overemphasize the role of social movements in legal reform. Certainly, social movements have played an important role in the reform of sodomy laws in particular national contexts, but this argument is more difficult to sustain when examining changes worldwide. Thus, we argue that sexuality studies and theories of legal reform could benefit from a comparative perspective.

A companion paper analyzes changes in the criminal regulation of sex across four sexual domains: adultery, rape, child sexual abuse, and sodomy. We demonstrate that legal changes around sex have rapidly spread throughout the globe over the second half of the 20th century, and that changes across all of these domains are linked to evolving conceptions of the individual and society. However, there remains substantial inequality in how these laws get implemented and where reform occurs.