By Andrew Cohen
In many ways, the pioneering Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS) encapsulates Berkeley Law’s mindset: prioritizing civic engagement, collaborating across disciplines to maximize impact, and assessing how law operates on the ground.
The center’s recent 65th anniversary conference underscored its approach that law does not operate in a silo, but rather is a social institution studied by historians, political scientists, public policy scholars, and sociologists. Multidisciplinary panels focused on criminal justice, inequality, democracy and civil society, and lessons for and from the legal profession.
“The center was built on a simple but powerful idea: that understanding law requires looking beyond the books — at legal institutions, legal processes, legal change, and the social consequences of law in the real world,” said Professor and CSLS Faculty Director Catherine Albiston J.D. ’93, Ph.D. ‘01.
The first university-based center for sociolegal research, CSLS continues to play an enormous role in connecting experts in different fields to illuminate crucial issues in society. Hosting over 300 visiting scholars from around the world over the years, it has created lasting networks and increased understanding of how formal legal structures interact with informal social structures.
The center also sponsors the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies fellowship program, bringing together doctoral students from a wide range of disciplines across the Berkeley campus, as well as providing summer research fellowships, travel funding, and research grants to Berkeley students seeking to influence policy and public dialogue on critical issues.
A 65th anniversary Kudoboard of reflections about the center, shown on a digital scroll at the conference, featured heartfelt sentiments from generations of scholars, including visiting Ph.D. researcher Anne Schlüter from the University of Münster in Germany.
“What makes CSLS such a special place is the way it brings together elements that often remain difficult to combine in academic practice: a deep engagement with social theory alongside rigorous empirical work; strong descriptive and explanatory research that is not an end in itself but always remains critically aware of power; and interdisciplinary and international exchange, not as a mere PR slogan but as an everyday practice of learning from one another,” she wrote. “More than anything, CSLS is a place where academic excellence and a genuine sense of community go hand in hand.”
Institutional respect
Throughout the conference, panelists noted the importance of public institutions, and successfully working within them, to a functional democracy. In the criminal justice panel, Stanford Law and Sociology Professor Matthew Clair discussed the harms caused by the burdens of state bureaucracies for people involved in over 17 million cases processed in U.S. criminal courts each year.
He highlighted how defendants routinely feel coerced into plea deals, given outsized prosecutorial power and the problems caused by overworked public defenders, and the importance of navigators — non-lawyer advocates who help guide people through court procedures, reduce confusion, and connect them with social services to reduce recidivism: “Clients with navigators are 80% less likely to be reincarcerated between their arraignment and next court date than those without them,” Clair said.
University of Pennsylvania Political Science Professor Marie Gottschalk noted that CSLS excels at calling attention to issues that sometimes fly under the radar. One such example she raised: the disproportionate attention paid to street crime rather than corporate crime, including the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Enron scandal and dot-com bust in the early 2000s, and the subprime mortgage disaster that triggered the 2008 recession.
“We have all these students who take economics courses with no understanding of what caused the Great Depression or more recent recessions,” Gottschalk said. “If we don’t pay attention to corporate crimes, there will continue to be no real consequences for those who commit them.”
University of Chicago Law School Professor Tom Ginsburg J.D. ’97, Ph.D. ’99 described how institutions and their bureaucracy are essential to democracy — and that the current gutting of civil services agencies threatens its longevity. He said CSLS founder Philip Selznick and fellow Berkeley Law Professor Martin Shapiro were ahead of their time realizing that outcomes can’t be fully understood without understanding the institutions behind them.
“Much of their view was that institutions are more than just the people inside them. They structure behavior and affect outcomes,” Ginsburg said. “That’s why we need interdisciplinary, problem-driven research — it’s a requirement to understand how things get done.”
Citing Colombia and Sri Lanka as examples where democratic backsliding stopped, he said sustaining institutional structures was paramount: “Military stay in their barracks when they get an illegal order, people counting votes do so accurately, the police protect people, and judges decide cases fairly.”
Law schools in the spotlight
The closing panel addressed what law and society scholarship can teach us about the legal profession in America’s current moment, and what scholars should study about it.
UC Irvine Law Professor Veena Dubal J.D. ’06, Ph.D. ’14, general counsel of the American Association of University Professors, said federal interventions targeting universities are creating various crises for higher education. In the midst of that, however, she sees law professors mobilizing as workers, conducting know-your-rights training sessions, building cross-campus coalitions with staff unions, and using legal knowledge as a resource for organizing.
“While university administrations have often capitulated, faculty — including law faculty — have claimed standing, fighting efforts to chill their speech,” she said, adding that while courts have ordered about 5,200 of the roughly 7,800 awarded research grants the Department of Government Efficiency froze to be reinstated, “that still leaves $1.4 billion worth of grants by the wayside.”
Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky closed the conference by examining what has stayed the same in legal education over the past 65 years (first-year courses), what has changed for the worse (rising tuition costs), what has changed for the better (student and faculty diversity, as well as the growth of clinics and increased emphasis on clinical experience), and the current role of legal education.
He said law schools must form an “intellectual foundation for resistance to attacks on the rule of law” through op-eds, speeches, and lawsuits. Lamenting how many universities and law firms have bowed to demands placed on them by the Trump administration, he noted how the four law firms that have fought back all won in court. Last year, when Chemerinsky organized a “mild letter” saying lawyers should not be punished for representing clients that some deem objectionable, he got only 76 of the nearly 200 deans at ABA-accredited law schools to sign it.
Referencing the center’s 65-year anniversary, he asked, “65 years from now, when people look back on us, will they praise us for our courage or condemn us for our capitulations?”
Chemerinsky praised CSLS for leading a growing recognition of law influencing and being influenced by other disciplines: “In that sense CSLS really is a pioneer. There were over 2,500 people from 60 countries last year at the annual Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. Most people being hired as law school faculty have Ph.D.s in other disciplines, and law school teaching is much better now.”
Beyond the conference itself, the center’s other recent programming has addressed racial justice and policing, elections and democracy, and the rule of law and autocracy.
“Empirical research on law and society is more important than ever as legal norms are upended and the role of law in democracy is at stake,” Albiston said. “Understanding how law operates on the ground — at our borders, in our streets, within workplaces, in health care, in elections, and in the administration of the state — could not be more important.”