Fall 2016/Spring 2017 LSC Emphasis

In the 2016–2017 year, the following courses made up the emphasis:

  1. Fall 2017: US Law and Literature in the 1880s (Brook Thomas)
  2. Winter 2018: Law & Science of Sentencing & Punishment (Jonathan Glater & Keramet Reiter)
  3. Spring 2018: Rights & Remedies in Law  (Jeff Helmreich)

The second cohort included 6 students, representing schools from across UCI:

Emma Gunderson
Advisor: Francesca Polletta
Emma is a law student interested in the criminal justice system and its impact on marginalized communities. Her background is in criminal defense and advocacy for sex workers and survivors of gender-based exploitation. She is particularly interested in the public defender’s perspective and its potential for transforming dialogues around social justice issues. Her work will focus on the impact of legal storytelling and cultural translation within criminal courtrooms, legal documents, and activist circles. 

Adam Lhedmat
Advisor: Jeff Helmreich

Alyssa Heckman
Advisor: Song Richardson
Alyssa plans to study the ways in which the civil courtroom's design (e.g., preponderance of evidence, and access to legal counsel) can create disparate outcomes of justice for people named on a civil gang injunction. Her research interests include critical legal studies, legal theory, civil gang injunctions, sociology of law, courtroom proceedings, access to justice, hip hop and rap lyrics as frameworks of justice, and feminist criminology.

James Adams
Advisor: Jennifer Chacón
James is interested in the semiotic study of law and the way in which legislation mediates the relationship between state, industry, and their illicit counterparts. In particular, he is interested in how U.S. immigration legislation and border enforcement policy relate to the operation of northern Mexico’s border-crossing industry.

Tania DoCarmo
Adviser: Kaaryn Gustafson
Tania studies culture, global inequality, the use of victim narratives for policy change, and the making of international human rights law. Prior to coming to UCI, she worked for 9 years within the international non-profit sector, focused primarily on human trafficking and labor exploitation.

Lauren Anderson
Advisor: Greg Shaffer
Lauren is broadly interested in areas of the state and state legitimation, law and society, and social movements and culture. She is currently working on a project that examines the legal, political, and cultural mechanisms by which the U.S. government and its territorial allies sought to legitimate the annexation of Hawaii between 1893-1959 and the strategies that the indigenous Kānaka Maoli movement utilized to resist this legitimation.