Our Students
Pamela Coukos
Year: Advanced to Candidacy (ABD) - JSP
Email: pcoukos at berkeley dot edu
Biography:I am currently advanced to candidacy in the PhD program, with a research focus on judicial politics and law and social movements. My dissertation is a study of the development of sexual harassment law in the United States, including the role of the women's movement mobilization and the effect of Reagan-era political conservatism.
I came to the JSP program after ten years of practicing civil rights law, doing impact litigation and policy work for the women's movement, and representing plaintiffs in Title VII race and gender class action cases as an associate and later as Of Counsel to a small private law firm.
J.D., Harvard Law School (1994)
A.B. with honors in Political Science, Brown University (1990)
PRIMARY TEACHING & RESEARCH INTERESTS
• Employment Discrimination, Civil Rights Law
• Civil Procedure (incl. Complex Litigation, Class Action Law, Federal Courts)
• Law and Social Science, Sociolegal Studies
• Feminist Jurisprudence, Women and the Law
• Law and Social Movements, Political Organizing
• Judicial Politics
ADDITIONAL TEACHING INTERESTS
• Family Law
• Jurisprudence
• Legislation
• Torts
• Professional Responsibility
• ADR
• Remedies
Berkeley Fellowship
Academic Experiences:Instructor, UC Berkeley School of Law (Spring 2008)
Taught Employment Discrimination Law
GSI, Legal Studies 19, Profs. Jonathan Simon and Maria Echeveste (Fall 2007)
Taught two sections of undergraduate course.
Research Assistant, Prof. Catherine Albiston, UC Berkeley JSP Program (2006-07)
Helping design and run statistical analysis of data on unpublished opinions.
Teaching Assistant, Prof. Daniel Rubinfeld, UC Berkeley JSP Program (Spring 2007)
Taught Stata programming and assisted students in graduate student quantitative methods section.
Research Assistant, Prof. Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School (1993-94)
Assisted with development of syllabus for advanced constitutional law class addressing bioethics issues.
Teaching Associate, Dean Edward Beiser, Brown University Political Science Dept. (1993-94)
Taught sections of undergraduate political science course, "The Politics of the Legal System" for two years.
Of Counsel, Mehri & Skalet, PLLC
Previous Positions:
Public Policy Director, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
Staff Attorney, NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund
HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT?
The Development of Sexual Harassment Law in the U.S. 1971-91
Committee Members: Lauren Edelman (JSP) (chair), Malcolm Feeley (JSP), Taeku Lee (Political Science)
In conventional judicial politics terms, the successful feminist mobilization to establish sexual harassment as a violation of Title VII is an anomaly. This dramatic judge-made expansion of American civil rights law occurred despite a politically hostile environment: the rise of conservatism and growing civil rights retrenchment in the courts and the relevant federal agencies and branches. Drawing on work by public law scholars attentive to law and rights mobilization, and key sociolegal literatures -- on social movements and law, cause lawyering and claims mobilization, and law and organizations -- I consider potential explanations. My multi-method study focuses on the role of parties to litigation in the emergence and establishment of this new rights claim. This study can expand existing knowledge on a number of issues situated at the intersection of politics, law and social movements, and will develop new data sets applicable to a broad array of future empirical projects.
Other Documents
- Employment Discrimination Course Syllabus
- 29 Harvard C.R.-C.L. Law Review 581 (1994) - "Civil Rights and Special Wrongs - the Amendment 2 Litigation"
- Bielby & Coukos, Statistical Dueling - William T. Bielby and Pamela Coukos, "Statistical Dueling With Unconventional Weapons: What Courts Should Know About Experts in Employment Discrimination Class Actions, 56 Emory Law Journal 1563 (2007)
