Bill Maurer, Justin Richland, Lee Cabatingan
  • February 4, 2026

  • Bill Maurer and Justin Richland, anthropology, and Lee Cabatingan, criminology, law and society, to lead Law and Society Association’s flagship journal

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UC Irvine anthropology professors Bill Maurer and Justin Richland, and criminology, law & society associate professor Lee Cabatingan, have been tapped as co-editors of the Law & Society Review, the 60-year-old leading peer-reviewed journal of the Law and Society Association. LSR publishes four issues annually featuring sociolegal scholarship on the relationship between society and the law, laws, legal institutions and legal processes. As co-editors, Maurer, Richland and Cabatingan will guide the journal’s content selection and peer-review process.

"As anthropologists - one of the 'original' fields constituting Law and Society’s earliest membership, but whose scholarship appears infrequently in LSR’s pages these days - and law scholars, but also in light of the dire challenges facing the rule of law today, our vision for LSR is one that redoubles efforts to inquire after the many ways law and society scholars of all stripes ask and answer the question, 'How does law matter?'” Richland says.

“In posing this question this way – that is, with an intentionally pluralistic understanding of ‘matter’ as both a question of law’s ideological significance and its empirically observable impact on people’s lives and worlds – we hope to spark urgent yet deliberative conversations about law in society, and position LSR as the premier venue for curating these vital discussions,” Maurer explains.

 “Our aim, in both selecting this theme, but also in all the plans we are making for the journal as well as other kinds of content online and for in-person forums, is to build on the foundational commitment of the Law and Society Association to be a place where scholars and practitioners of law can come together from across their disciplinary and institutional divides to engage in robust, clear-eyed debate about the contours of law’s place in our complex social worlds," Cabatingan adds.

Maurer is currently dean of the School of Social Sciences, professor of anthropology and law, and director of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine. He is an internationally recognized expert on the anthropology of law, money and finance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation as well as multiple public and private foundations, associations, and corporations. In 2016, he was named a fellow of the Filene Research Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Maurer earned his A.B. in anthropology and women’s studies at Vassar College, and his master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford University. He’s been a member of the UCI faculty since 1996.

Richland is professor and chair of the anthropology department at UCI. He earned his J.D. at UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. at UCLA. He studies Native American law and politics in the contemporary moment – particularly the interface between tribal nations in the U.S. and the U.S. federal and state governments. In 2015 he was appointed to his second term of service by the Hopi Tribal Government as Associate Justice of the Hopi Appellate Court (from 2006-09, he served as Justice Pro Tempore). In 2016, he became a member of the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation and he was named a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow. In 2018, he was appointed to a three-year term as an American Bar Foundation Faculty Fellow.

Cabatingan is an associate professor of criminology, law & society with a joint appointment in anthropology. Her research, supported by the National Science Foundation and other private foundations, such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, focuses on topics in anthropology of law and legal institutions; nation, state, and region formation; sovereignty; conceptualizations of property; socialism and late-socialism; postcolonial studies; and the Caribbean, especially Cuba and the Anglophone Caribbean. She earned her A.B. at Princeton University, her J.D. at University of California Hastings College of the Law (now known as UC Law SF), and her master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. 

 

 

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