By Andrew Cohen
Innovative and powerful leadership is evident throughout the Berkeley Law community, from students and alumni to faculty and staff. We highlight various examples to showcase how such leadership advances justice, accountability, and the rule of law.
Laura Beth Nielsen ’96, Ph.D. ’99 didn’t set out to make history when she enrolled at Berkeley Law. But the first woman executive director in the 75-year existence of the American Bar Foundation (ABF) has long been guided by it.
A prominent sociology of law expert and Northwestern University professor, Nielsen studies how ordinary people understand the law and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Focusing on employment law, her work shows how even favorable case outcomes rarely alter unfair workplace conditions, and contends that the current approach to discrimination law often entrenches problems rather unravels them.
Her work and commentary have appeared in a slew of major media outlets including the New York Times, Time, the Washington Post, and USA Today, she has been a guest on National Public Radio, Fox News, and PBS Newshour, and her prolific scholarship is published across numerous leading law reviews.
She has a new book coming out next year analyzing institutional circumstances that enable abuse, the impact of legal responses, and law’s capacity to address this problem. Nielsen is also working on a manuscript arguing that American democracy is decaying because it treats rights and liberties as individual possessions rather than relational infrastructures and practices.
The recipient of grants and awards from several foundations and organizations, Nielsen recently took time to describe her formative experience at Berkeley Law, her work at ABF, and the growing importance of studying law’s role in society.
What sparked your interest in law school?
I was a Sociology and Legal Studies major at UC Santa Cruz, drawn to law’s capacity for social change. Like a lot of the undergraduates I have taught, I was impressed by law’s apparent power to do enormously important things — think Brown v. Board of Education.
But I never fully bought the idea that changing law on paper, from the top down, would necessarily create change in our social world. I always want to know what’s really happening. I seek to bring the tools of empirical social science disciplines like sociology, economics, political science, and history to bear on those questions, and I didn’t want to be tied to just one discipline. I was also interested in law’s symbolic power to shape meanings and expectations about a better society.
What drew you to Berkeley Law?
What really captured me was how ordinary people understand and use the law in their everyday lives — what scholars call legal consciousness. That’s what led me to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP). As I moved through that program, I came to understand how much legal institutions, legal processes, and the legal profession themselves matter.
You can pass all the laws you want to end discrimination or address sexual assault, but if there aren’t lawyers who can bring those claims, courts that ordinary people can actually access, and rules that give the underrepresented a way to make their case, then the laws aren’t going to do much to achieve justice on the ground. That combination of rigorous, problem-driven social science with deep engagement in law and legal institutions was, and still is, unique to JSP. No other program does quite what JSP does, and that’s why I chose Berkeley.
What was the most meaningful aspect of your time here?
Two things stand out. First, I served as editor-in-chief of what was then the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal (now the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice), where I learned above all how to read and write carefully. We worked closely with our colleagues at the African-American Law and Policy Report (now the Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy), and this was right when California was dismantling affirmative action, so we were writing with real purpose and urgency, knowing the stakes of getting the work right.
Second, and just as important, was the community itself. At Berkeley you find so many people deeply committed to both rigorous scholarship and social justice. That combination of intellectual seriousness and shared purpose has stayed with me. It prepared me, I think, for the academic leadership roles that followed: chairing the Department of Sociology at Northwestern, serving as president of the Law and Society Association, and now leading the ABF as executive director.
How did you become involved in the ABF, and what is its purpose?
As my career as a scholar progressed in my time at Berkeley Law, I began attending meetings of the Law and Society Association, where scholars are interested in understanding law not as an abstract set of rules but as a lived social institution. We study how law operates, who it serves, and how it intersects with everyday life. It was there that I learned of the American Bar Foundation by meeting ABF scholars. Coming from JSP, it was something of a revelation to discover there were entire research institutes dedicated to using social science to understand law.
I became a research assistant for Robert L. Nelson, and we worked together on a paper, “Cops, Counsel and Entrepreneurs: Constructing the Role of Inside Counsel in Large Corporations.” That gave me a firsthand look at the kind of work ABF does. When I finished my JD/Ph.D. and went on the job market, ABF had a research professor position open. I applied, got it, and went on to join the Northwestern Sociology faculty in 2006 while maintaining my ABF affiliation.
ABF is really unique. We’re an independent, nonpartisan, social-science-oriented research institute dedicated to the study of legal institutions, legal education, the legal profession, and the legal needs of the public. In addition, our faculty studies criminal law, housing justice, juries, mass incarceration and its aftermath, the role of lawyers in democratic societies domestically and globally, and so much more. We’re a genuinely interdisciplinary community.
How meaningful is it to be the first woman to lead the ABF?
It’s deeply meaningful, though I’d put it in context: The ABF has a long history of recognizing women’s scholarly and professional leadership, even if I’m the first woman in this particular seat. Berkeley’s own Herma Hill Kay (my dean when I started law school) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were both long-serving ABF board members; we now have a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Endowed Fund supporting research on women’s rights and civil liberties.
Scholars like Lauren Edelman ’86 (a longtime Berkeley Law professor who sat on my dissertation committee), Deborah Rhode, Rachel Moran, and Kimberlé Crenshaw are all past recipients of the Fellows of the ABF’s outstanding scholar award. Important “first women” bar leaders have served on our board as well, including the first two African American women presidents of the American Bar Association. The ABF has always recognized the contributions of women; I’m honored to now be responsible for shepherding that legacy of research forward.
What are your goals for the organization?
We’re celebrating our 75th year with a series of events and a fundraising campaign. For the first time, we’re opening our Honorary Society of Fellows of the American Bar Foundation to a broader group of outstanding leaders. We’re inviting a select group of leaders from affinity bars including the American Law Institute, Association of American Law Schools, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, National Bar Association, National Hispanic Bar Association, and Native American Bar Association. It’s a meaningful expansion of who gets a seat at the ABF table.
Long term? Fundamentally, my job is to ensure the continuation of the highest-quality empirical research on law, legal institutions, legal process, and legal education. My ultimate goal is to leave ABF with a strong foundation of excellent researchers, on solid financial footing, and with a permanent place at the table for the major conversations shaping law, legal institutions, the legal profession, and our society.
Can you briefly discuss the democracy-focused manuscript you’re working on and the rule of law’s role in upholding democracy?
I wrote this book before I ever imagined becoming ABF’s executive director, drawing on years of my own research (and others’) to think seriously about how we rebuild democratic institutions and forge a path toward a new, improved, shared democracy. The argument rests on three pillars: rights as conditions for human flourishing, liberty as a shared achievement rather than an individual entitlement, and participation as the everyday practice of belonging to a community.
The rule of law runs through all three pillars: it’s what makes rights real rather than aspirational, what makes liberty something we hold in common rather than something we each defend alone, and what makes participation meaningful rather than symbolic. Democracy doesn’t survive on good intentions; it survives on functioning legal institutions that people can actually trust and use, which is exactly why the work I do now at ABF and the argument of this book are, for me, two sides of the same project.
How concerned are you about threats to our legal institutions, and what do you see as the best steps to uphold them?
Like many lawyers, I’m concerned about the erosion of democratic institutions and norms happening now. So many of our social institutions are operating in uncharted territory, universities, law firms, libraries, and even our cities are facing new kinds of threats and sanctions for basic activity.
At the same time, the research funding infrastructure for studying these issues has come under real pressure. ABF, like many research institutions, lost federal grant funding this year. So at precisely the moment when law is having an enormous impact on people’s lives, our collective capacity to study that impact carefully is being tested.
We might wish these things weren’t happening, but ABF exists for exactly this moment. We bring 75 years of peer-reviewed social science evidence produced by economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists who are deeply steeped in law to bear on exactly these questions. Our job is to keep doing that research, so that when we reach a better place, we’ll have the analysis in hand, and a rigorous historical record of this era.