Matthew S. Erie (J.D., Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor, Member of the Law Faculty, and Associate Research Fellow of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.

Professor Erie’s interdisciplinary work combines law and anthropology to expand the theoretical bases and empirical borders of comparative law, with a particular focus on Chinese law, Islamic law, and Asian law, more generally. Specifically, he has written on Chinese domestic law (e.g., property law, constitutional law, and ethnic and religious policy) and international law (e.g., dispute resolution, conflict of laws, anti-corruption law, and investment law).

His first book, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016), is the first ethnographic study of the relationship between sharia and state law in China. His current research project “China, Law and Development,” funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (€1.5 million), examines China’s approach to building cross-border order through international economic law and the regulatory regimes of developing host states.

Daniel Fryer is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

Daniel previously served as a judicial law clerk for the Honorable Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He also worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia, PA. 

Daniel received his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 2018, and is a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is informed by scholarship in social and political philosophy, law, the social sciences, and public policy. He is also influenced by social movements and intellectual discourse outside the academy. His recent research focuses on assessing how we should construct legal and political institutions to respond to various forms of social and economic inequality; the history of African American political thought; the ethics of punishment; and race theory.

Ann Heffernan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Ann’s research and teaching interests include contemporary political theory, disability studies, feminist theory, and American political development. Her current book project, Disability: A Democratic Dilemma, brings into view the significance of disability in mediating the relationship between citizens and the American state. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples—among them the rise of waged labor, the Flint, Michigan water crisis, the healthcare debate, and, most recently, the proposed expansion of public charge requirements in U.S. immigration law—she shows how the boundaries and defining features of political membership are stabilized and recast in and through disability. 

Leila Kawar is an Associate Professor of Social Theory and Practice and Associate Professor of American Culture in the Residential College at the University of Michigan.

Leila is a socio-legal scholar whose work examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice. Her comparative research has focused on how the work of lawyers, judges, and other legal experts intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Law and Society at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. Her first monograph, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France, is published in the Law and Society Series of Cambridge University Press and is a co-winner of the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob book prize. Contesting Immigration Policy in Court also received the 2016 book award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association. Her current research project explores the contributions of legal practices, principles, and professionals to liberal reform efforts in the domain of migrant labor governance. 

Nora Krinitsky is a Lecturer (III) of the Residential College, Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project, and Faculty Affiliate at the University of Michigan Carceral State Project.

Nora is a historian of the modern United States who specializes in urban history, African American history, and the history of the American carceral state. She earned her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan in 2017. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University and at the University of Michigan. She is the Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project as well as a faculty affiliate of the U-M Carceral State Project’s Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative, a major humanistic study of the impact of criminalization, policing, incarceration, and surveillance in the United States. 

Greta Krippner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Greta is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in economic sociology, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social theory. Her work explores how the rise of the market has intersected wider social, cultural, and political transformations in U.S. society in the “long” twentieth century. Her first book, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2011), examined the financialization of the U.S. economy in the period since the 1970s, arguing that the turn to finance was an inadvertent response to unresolved distributional dilemmas as post-war growth stalled. Her current book project traces the evolution of methods of risk-based pricing over the course of the twentieth century, asking how the notion that each individual should “pay the cost” of her own riskiness emerged as a widely accepted normative principle governing how risk is distributed in contemporary society.

Andrew Lanham is the Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Andrew is a legal and cultural historian whose work focuses on the dynamics of progressive protest movements and legal change in the twentieth-century United States. He holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and masters degrees in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford, and he is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in English at Yale University. His current project, titled The Necessity of Peace: Antiwar Protest and the Long Quest for Equality in the United States, is a new archival history of antiwar protest movements in the twentieth-century United States, their frequent collaborations with allied social justice movements, and their profound impact on civil rights and civil liberties law and the shape of the U.S. national security state. In addition to his scholarly work, his writing on politics, law, and culture has also appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Matt Lassiter is Professor of History, Urban and Regional Planning, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan.

Matt is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book project, The Suburban Crisis: The War on Drugs and White Middle-Class America, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. He is on the steering committee of the U-M Carceral State Project and the co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative. He is also director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab and coordinator of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, each of which involves undergraduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He has served on the boards of the Urban History Association, Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History and is a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sandy Levitsky is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law (by courtesy) at the University of Michigan.

Sandy’s research lies at the intersection of sociology of law, political sociology, and social movements.  Her work considers the ways in which contemporary social welfare problems are changing cultural understandings of what types of social needs or interests ought to be protected as “rights” or “entitlements” in the U.S. context.  Her book, Caring for Our Own:  Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (Oxford 2014), inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than ask why the American state hasn’t responded to unmet social welfare needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don’t American families view unmet social welfare needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements?

Bill Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

Bill is an award-winning legal scholar and historian. He teaches in the fields of legal history, legislation, and regulation, and his research interests focus on the history of the modern American regulatory state. He previously was a professor of history at the University of Chicago and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 1996, he published The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press), which won the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for Best Book in the History of Law and Society. He has since co-edited three additional books: The Democratic Experiment (Princeton University Press) in 2003 with Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, The State in U.S. History (University of Chicago Press) in 2015 with Jim Sparrow and Steve Sawyer, and The Corporation and American Democracy (Harvard University Press) in 2017 with Naomi Lamoreaux and The Tobin Project.

Emily Prifogle is Assistant Professor of Law and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Emily is also a co-director of the Program in Race, Law and History at Michigan Law.

Emily’s research focuses on the social history of the law and includes study of place, gender and sexuality, and race. 

​Emily’s book project, “The Heartland’s Legal Landscapes & the Remaking of Modern Rural America, 1920-2020,” grows from her dissertation “Cows, Cars, and Criminals: The Legal Landscape of the Rural Midwest, 1920-1975.” It argues that the legal remaking of rural communities was a central feature of twentieth-century America. The result is a new legal history that tells not a story of rural decline but a story of the rural Midwest in a constant process of transformation along lines of class, race, and gender.

Heather Ann Thompson is the Frank W Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies, and Professor in the Residential College at the University of Michigan.

Heather is also co-founder of the Carceral State Project and its multi-pronged Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative the University of Michigan, and has been appointed to serve as well as a member of the standing Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.

Heather is a historian, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Blood in the Water won the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency, and the book also received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

Heather has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system.

Mariah Zeisberg is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

Mariah’s primary research interests lie in constitutional theory, philosophy of law, liberal and democratic theory, and American political development. She is interested in the challenge that subjectivity, pluralism, and conflict pose to liberal ideas about political authority, which she addresses through research specifically on US constitutional practice. Her book War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority (Princeton University Press, 2013), develops an account of constitutional fidelity for the electoral branches.

Her current work explores the antislavery constitutional project. A recent piece, “Frederick Douglass and Constitutional Emergency: An Homage to the Political Creativity of Abolitionist Activism,” in States of Exception in American History (eds. Gary Gerstle & Joel Isaac, Chicago, 2020), explores Frederick Douglass’ constitutional politics in the context of the emergency of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.