Scoring Justice: Risk Assessment Tools, Court Practices, and Fairness Perceptions

April 21st, 2026
10:00am-11:30am

A presentation of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

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Please join us on Tuesday, April 21 for a lecture by Simone Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The talk is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

About the Speaker

Simone Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. Her research examines how classification systems, predictive models, and AI shape the distribution of benefits, burdens, and recognition in society. Much of her work focuses on the implications of these systems for institutional decision-making in social policy, education, and law. She received a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University.

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Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide

April 29th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Wednesday, April 29th from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book California Color Lines: Racial Politics in an Era of Economic Precarity, by G. Cristina Mora, Professor of Sociology and Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of African American Studies, both at UC Berkeley.

Professors Mora and Paschel will be joined in conversation by Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Lisa García Bedolla, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley. Nicholas Vargas, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education and the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

About the Book

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention — a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world’s most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as “not as bad as the South.” Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California’s future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California’s foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.

Panelists

G. Cristina Mora completed her B.A. in Sociology at UC Berkeley in 2003 and earned her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University in 2009. Before returning to Cal, she was a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Professor Mora’s award-winning research focuses mainly on questions of racial and ethnic categorization, racial politics, and immigration. Her book, Making Hispanics, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and provides a socio-historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” panethnic category in the United States. This work, along with related articles, has received wide recognition, including the Best Dissertation Award and the 2018 Early Career Award (SREM) from the American Sociological Association. Her work has also been the subject of various national media segments in venues like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA.

At UC Berkeley, her long-term efforts towards diversity and inclusion have recently been formally acknowledged. In 2021 and 2022, she received the UCB Graduate Mentoring Award and the Chancellors Award for Advancing Equity and Excellence, and she led campus’ first social-science cluster hire focused on “Latinos and Democracy.” In 2023 she received a million-dollar federal grant from the Department of Education to establish a “Latino Social Science Pipeline” initiative at UC Berkeley.

Tianna Paschel is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America. Her work can be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, and various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for Black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor – along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones – of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and Blackness in the Americas.

Professor Paschel is a Ford Fellow, member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, the Council of the Law Section of ASA, and the Steering Committee of the Network of Anti-Racist Action and Research (RAIAR).

Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of the Graduate Division, and Chancellor’s Professor of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS), among others – to shed light on these questions.

She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color. Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.

Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. His research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book will read Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that grounds the wrong of slavery in property rights in another person. His work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.

Professor Jagmohan is the winner of several awards and fellowships: The APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018), and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Hellman Fellowship at UC, Berkeley. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, he was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Nicholas Vargas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His scholarship examines Latinx racialization: how Latinx people are identified, perceived, and positioned within U.S. racial hierarchies, and how these processes intersect with immigration ideologies, state institutions, and higher education inequality. A central aim of his work is to clarify how racial categories and racial meaning are produced in everyday life and policy contexts, and how those dynamics shape public attitudes. Methodologically, Vargas draws on survey research, administrative and demographic data, and mixed-method strategies that connect macro-level structures to micro-level meaning-making. His work bridges ethnic studies, sociology, and education research, and he frequently collaborates with student researchers to develop data-rich projects that speak to pressing public questions and contribute to ongoing debates in Latino/Latinx social science. Vargas has served on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee and is Co-Director of the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at UC Berkeley. He also serves as the Program Coordinator of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and co-leads UC Berkeley’s Latinxs and Democracy Cluster.

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Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

April 9th, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Thursday, April 9th from 12-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Briggs will be joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, will moderate.

About the Book

In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.

Panelists

Charles Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in Folkloristics and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is interested in philosophical and ethnographic issues regarding how bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives and songs, and race constantly get mixed up, sometimes fatally. He has engaged these issues by investigating epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, struggling with relatives, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists to figure out why so many people die from preventable diseases. His concern with infectiousness spreads from microbes to narratives, to thinking about who produces the stories of H1N1, Ebola, diabetes, etc. that proliferate in traditional and social media, thereby shaping the imaginations of policymakers, clinicians, journalists, and publics.

Elinor Ochs is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA. Primary among Professor Ochs’ many research interests is the role of language and culture in life span human development and learning across social groups. Her work with children and their caregivers in Samoa, as well as her collaborative work with anthropologist B. Schieffelin, helped to develop the field of inquiry known as language socialization. Most recently, Professor Ochs has taken on the direction of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, a Sloan Center on Working Families that examines how members of middle class working families create a home life through culturally and situationally organized social interactions.

Eric Snoey: For the past 35 years, Dr. Snoey has been an Emergency Medicine physician and core faculty at Highland Hospital; a teaching and safety net hospital in Oakland, California. His areas of expertise include cardiovascular emergencies, the application of point-of-care ultrasound and medical education. More recently, Dr. Snoey has begun to focus more on macro-issues and threats to the delivery of emergency healthcare: ER over crowding, the problem of over testing and defensive medicine, budget cuts, predicted work force shortages and the challenges of end-of-life care.

Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Lara-Millán does political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and politics. He is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape.

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Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa

March 18th, 2026
1:30pm

Part of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program

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Please join us on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 1:30pm for a public lecture by Julien Migozzi, an economic geographer and Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Migozzi’s lecture, “Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa,” will examine how 21st-century class dynamics become connected with data-driven stratification systems, focusing on the digital transformation of property markets.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. It is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Abstract

How do persistent inequalities and rapid technological change shape class formation? Centred on South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, this presentation examines how contemporary class dynamics become intertwined with racialised, data-driven mechanisms of social sorting.

Integrating computational analysis with in-depth fieldwork across the suburbs and corporate boardrooms of Cape Town, I demonstrate how digital, legal, and financial transformations have reorganised the housing market around a data imperative. Once based on racial categories to exclude the majority from urban property under apartheid, the market is now structured around credit scoring to allocate mortgages and sort the “good” from the “bad” home-seeker, encoding racial inequalities in seemingly colour-blind market outcomes.

Thinking class from the realm of digitised markets, I document and theorise how the making of the South African middle-class rests upon the production of a “mortgaged periphery”, where middle-income households earn their middle-class stripes by scoring “high enough” to access debt-leveraged homeownership in gated estates. In this suburban, post-apartheid space, physical fences and algorithmic barriers regulate the production and access to housing wealth, materialising class boundaries through asset ownership, capital gains, property aesthetics, and debt relationships.

About the Speaker

Julien Migozzi is an economic geographer and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, after appointments at Oxford University and the École Normale Supérieure. At the intersection of geography, urban studies and economic sociology, Julien’s research investigates how digital technologies affect markets, cities, and inequalities, with a particular interest in housing and financial markets. At Cambridge, Julien is teaching a course on digital capitalism. He is a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024).

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Matrix Teach-In: Ula Taylor

February 19th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:15 PM PT

Part of the Matrix Teach-Ins Event Series

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Please join us on Thursday, February 19 at 12:00pm as Ula Taylor, Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies, will present a Matrix Teach-In. The talk will center on Professor Taylor’s current work in progress, an oral biography of Frances M. Beal.

This talk is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

About Matrix Teach-Ins

Have you ever wished you could hear your colleague deliver the lecture that students rave about, or revisit a favorite subject yourself? Matrix Teach-Ins are a new series designed to bring UC Berkeley’s most engaging social science lectures into a public setting. Instructors will share their favorite lesson, the one students remember long after the semester ends, as a stand-alone lecture reimagined for anyone curious to learn.

Abstract

In this talk, I am going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments where she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical during the 1960s and 70s. Understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st-century activists because I explore fatigue and failures alongside empowering sisterhood, pleasurable heterosexual sex, and disciplined study. By doing so, I aim to bring to the fore the exhaustion and exhilaration.

About the Speaker

Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes.

In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for UC Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor, and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.

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New Directions: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Perspectives

March 10th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the New Directions event series

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Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel — part of the Social Science Matrix New Directions series — will bring together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.

This panel will feature Jaleel Plummer, a Joint PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory; Andrea Lara-Garcia, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography; Anna Feign, a graduate student in sociology; and Sophia Perez, graduate student in Geography at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography, Anthropology, and Sociology.

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Trevor Jackson: “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World”

April 7th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Tuesday, April 7th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Professor Jackson will be joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Sociology.

About the Book

Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way. How did it happen?

With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.

Panelists

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and over-accumulation since the 17th century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health. His second book, a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. He sometimes writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for the popular press, at places like Dissent, The Baffler, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.

Chenzi Xu is Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest on understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She holds a BA from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history, where she was the William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College and a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar.

Dylan John Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. Reviewers have called this book “the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of Fascism that has appeared in years,” and “brilliant and courageous.” A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed in preparation for Palgrave), argues, against state centered accounts of official information, that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society. In addition, Riley has started a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, and the New Left Review. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.

Abhishek Kaicker (moderator) is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900), with focus on the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial South Asia. His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2020), shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. More immediately, he is writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.

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Daniela Cammack: “Demos: How the People Ruled Athens”

April 20th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on April 20th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). The book is scheduled to be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press.

Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by Alison McQueen, the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; and James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. Marianne Constable, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and the Department of History.

About the Book

Historians and political theorists have long believed that they knew the meaning of the ancient Greek word demokratia. To democracy’s detractors, it meant mob rule; to its supporters, it meant the rule of the entire citizen community over itself. This book argues, by contrast, that the ancient Greeks shared a conception of demokratia that partly overlapped with each of these interpretations while transcending them both. Demokratia was the organized rule of the mass over its leading men. Ordinary citizens, assembled in large numbers, ruled over their own politicians and thereby over the community as a whole.

This regime was underpinned by kratos, the power of the stronger, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts in 508, 411, and 404 BC. But it was routinely manifested by the supreme political authority — or “sovereignty,” to use Hobbes’s term — of large crowds of ordinary men acting as policymakers, citizen-judges, and lawmakers. Especially in the years 403 to 322, which Aristotle correctly diagnosed as the era of “ultimate democracy,” the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by democrats today: making use of talented and ambitious politicians without being ruled by them. Demos asks: can we do the same?

Panelists

Daniela Cammack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). She holds a B.A. in Modern History and English Literature (2002) from Oxford, an M.Phil. in Political Theory and Intellectual History (2005) from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Political Theory (2013) from Harvard, where her dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, won Harvard’s Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in Political Science. Before moving to Berkeley in 2019, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor at Yale. Over the past decade, she has published in numerous edited volumes and journals including Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Polis, The Journal of Politics, Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and The Journal of Sortition. Cammack studies the differences and similarities between ancient and modern democratic ideas and practices, focusing on the themes of crowd power, deliberation, representation, and sovereignty. Authors of special interest are Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Her first book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, will be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press. A sequel, entitled What was Democracy? A Short History, is in progress and also under contract with Princeton.

Alison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought. McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists — Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau — to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought.

James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. His teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception, and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010; pbk. 2016). A continuation of this inquiry is The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk. 2020), which received the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies (2017). A further strand is Jewish literary and critical thought in authors from Spinoza to Freud, Adorno, and Arendt. His most recent book is Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021; pbk. 2023), which captures some of his interest in classical reception studies. He is co-editor of the preeminent series in this field, “Classical Presences” (Oxford University Press, 2005– ), and a member of the collective that published “Postclassicisms” (Chicago University Press, 2019). All of these topics spill over into his teaching, and many of them have begun their life there, because he finds that the classroom is one of the most productive places you can ever be.

Marianne Constable (moderator), Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014), Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History). An expert on law and language, she has co-edited two books on law and society, another in interdisciplinary legal studies, and a special issue in legal history. She has written numerous articles on such topics as Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of “community,” Arendt and the rhetoric of sustainability, law in the liberal arts, the paper shredder, and language in politics. She is currently completing a history of the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a hundred years ago; she also has some shorter pieces on philosophical dialogues in the works.

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American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

January 21st, 2026
4:00pm-5:15pm

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Please join us on Wednesday, January 21, 2026 from 4:00pm-5:15pm for a book talk by Paul Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. Professor Starr will discuss his book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.

The talk will be moderated by Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Department of Sociology.

About the Book

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama-and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture, in a nutshell, what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

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Paola Bacchetta, “Co-Motion: Rethinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances”

February 5th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on February 5th from 12pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances, by Paola Bacchetta, Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Bacchetta will be joined in conversation by Roshanak Kheshti, Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and Leti Volpp, Professor and Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Chair in Access to Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. Lawrence Cohen, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Department of Anthropology; Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and Department of French Studies.

About the Book

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transform power, and to enact freedom.

Panelists

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the first Chair of Berkeley’s Gender Consortium. She currently serves as Co-coordinator of Decolonizing Sexualities Network, a transnational convergence of scholars, artivists and activists. Her other books include Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, co-edited with Minoo Moallem (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali (co-edited with Laura Fantone, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (India: Women Ink, 2004); and Right-Wing Women (co-edited with Margaret Power, New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published over 70 articles and book chapters on: feminist queer decolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer theory; lesbian and queer of color theorie artivisms and activisms; decolonial feminist translating; gender, sexuality and right-wing movements (India, France, U.S., Brazil). She has translated multiple texts, including Fatima Mernissi’s only (co-authored) film project, The Lionesses (French to English). She recently oversaw the translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza into French (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards: Harvard Divinity School, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, State of Kerala Erudite Scholar Award, European Union funding awards, France-Berkeley Fund award, and more.

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice and the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. Her most recent publications include “Crossing Borders, Criminality, and Indigenous Sovereignty” in Critical Times (2024) and “Weep the People: On the Limits of Citizenship,” in UC Law Review (2024). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019), and of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). At Berkeley, she is also an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies. She is also a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Roshanak Kheshti is an anthropologist, feminist, queer and race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work sits at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics”. She has previously published in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!

Lawrence Cohen is Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program. His current work is on large genealogical platforms and on the discovery of unknown kin as a mode of relatedness, with attention in particular to how kinship was digitized and monetized before the advent of genetic relatedness platforms. Like his work on Indian surveillance and platform capitalism, the focus is on “de-duplication” as an emergent rationality of both relationship and of truth. Much of this work has been centered in urban north and central India, particularly in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, and Varanasi. In addition to working with undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at UC Berkeley, he has held appointments at the University of Zurich and Tokyo University. His primary appointment at UC Berkeley is in the Department of Anthropology, with a secondary appointment in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. He was hired sometime in the previous century to teach medical anthropology, and became a part of a terrific group of scholars in the Joint UC Berkeley-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program. He currently co-directs the Berkeley side of this two-campus program. Previously he directed the Institute for South Asia Studies and held the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies.

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California Spotlight: Higher Education Under Attack

February 9th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the California Spotlight Event Series

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Higher education is facing mounting pressures, from political intervention and financial challenges to attacks on academic freedom. These tensions are visible in the University of California system, where debates over funding, governance, labor, and public mission are increasingly shaping the future of public universities. This panel brings together leading scholars to examine the forces challenging public higher education today. Drawing on areas spanning finance, policy, and labor, the discussion will explore how these dynamics are shaping the UC System, and what is at stake for students, employees, the public, and the future of higher education.

This panel will feature Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced; Katherine Newman, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California; and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology.

Panelists

Charlie Eaton is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced, where he co-founded the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab. Eaton’s research investigates the role of politics, organizations, and race in the interplay between economic elites and insurgent social groups. He asks such questions as, what forms of organization support elite efforts to consolidate power in politics and the economy? And, what are effective organizational strategies by which non-elites can achieve more equitable distributions of power, wealth, and status?

His book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about finance and higher education as two central and overlapping domains in which elites and non-elites vie for status and resources. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street helped the most elite private schools achieve record endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transformed for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities have been squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. This organizational inequality has both exploited and magnified racial inequalities in household wealth and economic opportunity. This research has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CNBC, Forbes, The Nation, Institutional Investor, Market Watch, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

In ongoing research, Charlie Eaton is investigating the role of finance and race in online higher education, public university enrollment patterns, and in other domains, such as healthcare and taxation. Across this research, he employs techniques in data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring racial, class, and organizational inequalities. With his collaborators at the HERE Lab, he publishes code and data from this work at the Higher Ed Data Hub.

Katherine Newman became the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California in January of 2023. She was simultaneously appointed as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Dr. Newman was previously the University of Massachusetts System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst, and prior to that, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Newman is the author of sixteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth in Western Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.

Dr. Newman has served as the Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton, the founding Dean of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the director of Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, where she served as the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Urban Studies in the Kennedy School of Government. She taught for 16 years in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and for two years in the School of Law at UC Berkeley.

Her latest publication, coauthored with Dr. Elisabeth Jacobs, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, entitled Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor, was published in March 2023. Her current project, in collaboration with UC Berkeley doctoral student Evelyn Bellew, examines the unionization of foreign auto/bus manufacturing plants in Alabama, among the first successful efforts at collective bargaining in this sector in the US South.

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is a Professor in Sociology at UC San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations. In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), for example, he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets that automated trading in the late twentieth century. By looking at how experts in telecommunications created novel niches within stock exchanges, Automating Finance shows how these technical workers slowly transformed both the devices and cultures of their organizations, enabling the transition from trading floors to purely electronic exchanges. Automating Finance combines insights across fields, from the theoretical insights from science and technology studies and the analytical lenses of institutional theory, to anthropological discussions of relations and the economic metaphors of market design. Shifting emphasis to processes of marketization in higher education, his most recent book, The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences, studies labor markets in the British academia, demonstrating how market-like interventions of quality assessment introduced in the 1980s transformed the practices, career structures, and disciplines of anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists working in the United Kingdom. The book is based on a methodological innovation that synthesizes computational techniques with the ethnographic logic of the extended case study. Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.

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Matrix on Point: Corruption in America

February 3rd, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

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Corruption is a persistent challenge in America, shaping institutions, influencing policy, and eroding public trust. Understanding its roots, mechanisms, and consequences is essential for assessing the health of democratic governance. This panel, to be held on Tuesday, February 3, brings together leading scholars from business, political science, and law to examine the many facets of corruption in the United States and the ways it is identified, constrained, and addressed.

The panel will feature Ernesto Dal Bó, Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at the UC Berkeley Haas School, Sarah Anzia, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Erwin Chemerinsky, Jesse H. Chopper Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. Sean Gailmard, Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Political Science.

Panelists

Sarah Anzia studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022) as well as Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She has also written extensively about the political activity and influence of public-sector unions, the politics of public pensions, policy feedback, and women in politics. Prof. Anzia teaches courses in both the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Travers Department of Political Science.

Ernesto Dal Bó is a political economist interested in governance broadly understood. His research focuses on a range of topics: political influence, social conflict, corruption, morality and social norms, state formation, the development of state capabilities, and the qualities and behavior of politicians and public servants. Most of his teaching takes place in the Berkeley MBA program and at the doctoral level where he teaches courses on political economy.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law. He is the author of nineteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent major books are Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (2022) and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (2021). In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the President of the Association of American Law Schools. He received his B.S. at Northwestern University and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.

Sean Gailmard studies how political institutions operate, change, and affect governance quality. His work focuses particularly on the US executive branch, checks and balances across branches of government, bureaucratic capacity, and the evolution of US institutions. Gailmard applies strategic and historical perspectives to these issues. Professor Gailmard is the author of Agents of Empire: English Imperial Governance and the Making of American Political Institutions, as well as Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch (winner of Best Book awards from APSA sections on Political Economy and Public Administration) and Statistical Modeling and Inference for Social Science, a Ph.D.-level textbook. He has published research in leading social science journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics.

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