Michele Statz, PhD joins BJI as the inaugural Director of Judicial Wellbeing. She is concurrently an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Affiliated Faculty with the University of Minnesota Law School, and an Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation.
Dr. Statz is trained as an anthropologist of law and is a leading scholar in judicial wellbeing and access to justice. Her research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation and has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Harvard Law & Policy Review, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others. She is also the author of Lawyering an Uncertain Cause (Vanderbilt 2018) and co-editor of Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice Research (Bloomsbury 2025). Statz is the founder and chair of the Law and Society Association’s Law and Rurality Collaborative Research Network and is a founding board member of the International Alliance for Working Class Academics.
Statz holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Comparative Law and Society Studies from the University of Washington. She is presently the Leonora Montgomery Scholar of Excellence at Meadville Lombard Theological School.