Our Students
Sonya L. Lebsack
Year: Advanced to Candidacy (ABD) - JSP
Biography:My graduate study has included rigorous training in empirical methods as well as traditional legal scholarship. My substantive area of expertise is the inter-disciplinary study of American legal institutions, especially courts.
My dissertation examines how and under what conditions federal branch configurations affect Supreme Court behavior. Formal models predict that the Court's discretionary power corresponds to the set of decisions that are Pareto efficient relative to the preferences of the executive and the legislature. The wider the Pareto set (more likely in divided than in unified government), the more discretion the Court enjoys. Efforts to demonstrate such variations in Court behavior empirically, however, have been contradictory or inconclusive.
I confront this lack by testing hypotheses based on recurring patterns of interbranch configurations in a relatively large number of cases from a range of doctrinal and institutional contexts. By beginning the difficult empirical work necessary to determine where branch relations explain behavior, and where they do not, I hope that my work will break new ground in the stalemate between institutional and attitudinal scholars and offer a descriptive basis for considering the extent to which politics affects the division of labor among the branches and the development of legal doctrine.
B.A., Yale University, with distinction in both majors (History and Music), May 2000
J.D., Boalt Hall, December 2005
Law and Courts
Political Methodology
American Politics
Election Law, Race and Voting Rights
University of California Regents Fellowship (comprehensive, multi-year award)
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, 2006
Equal Justice America Fellow, Summer 2003
Jurisprudence Award (first in class), Minority Vote Dilution
California Law Review, Articles Editor, Volume 94, 2005-2006
Graduate Student Instructor: Comparative Courts, Professor Martin Shapiro (Spring 2006); Juvenile Justice, Professor Frank Zimring (Fall 2005); Discrimination, Law, and Inequality, Professor Linda Hamilton Krieger (Summer 2004)
Berkeley Women's Law Journal, Recent Developments Editor
Law Clerk, Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, South District of New York, 2008-09
Law Clerk, Hon. Richard A. Paez, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals 2007-08
Summer Associate, WilmerHale, Summer 2005
Research Assistant, Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, 2004-05
Law Clerk, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Summer 2003
Analyst, United States Department of Justice, Voting Section, 2000-02
