Exploring How Ordinary People Understand and Mobilize the Law
Laura Beth studies the legal system as a social system to better understand law’s capacity for solving individual and social problems, especially those based on hierarchies of unearned privilege such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Laura Beth Nielsen
Professor, and Chair of Sociology at Northwestern University,
Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and
President of the Law and Society Association
Laura Beth’s research focuses on law’s capacity for social change. Her primary field is the sociology of law, with particular interests in legal consciousness (how ordinary people understand the law) and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class.
She is an expert in the areas of sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond, employment civil rights of all sorts including pregnancy, pay, race, sex, national origin, and is a scholar of the legal profession.