Laura Beth Nielsen is Professor & Chair of Sociology and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.  She is a sociologist and lawyer with degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1999 and J.D. 1996).  

Professor Nielsen’s research interests are in 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. Her most recent monograph, Rights on Trial: How Employment Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (Chicago, 2017) examines the litigation system of employment civil rights in the United States.  Her first monograph, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech, (Princeton University Press, 2004) studies racist and sexist street speech, targets’ reactions and responses to it, and attitudes about using law to deal with such speech.  She has participated in Congressional briefings about federal hate crime legislation and the role of speech in hate crime.

She has co-edited three books about rights in general and employment civil rights in particular including Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Rights, (Ashgate, 2007) and Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research:  Rights and Realities, (with Robert L. Nelson, Springer, 2005); and New Civil Rights Research:  A Constitutive Approach (with Ben Fleury-Steiner, Ashgate 2006).

Coverage of her scholarship and her own commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, FOX News, Morning Edition (NPR), ABC Radio, Al-Jazeera English, the Huffington Post, USA Today, and the Nation.  

In addition, she is the author of numerous articles published in the UCLA Law Review, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Policy, Stanford Journal of Law and Policy, and the Wisconsin Law Review.  She is also the recipient of grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the MacArthur Foundation.  

Professor Nielsen 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.