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Fall 2022/Spring 2023 LSC Emphasis

In the 2022–2023 year, the following courses make up the emphasis, along with year-long participation in the Socio-Legal Studies Workshops:

Multi- and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Law is a reading and discussion seminar. We will read a book or several articles each week, and students will come to class ready (and willing) to discuss it. We will engage with law from a substantial number of distinct disciplinary perspectives (anthropology, economics, history, literature, rhetoric, sociology, political science) which we will use in an attempt to construct our own "interdisciplinary" knowledge of law. "Interdisciplinarity" stands for the attempt to reconnect what was pulled apart in the creation of the disciplines. It generally takes one of three forms: an attempt to cultivate a perspective on a realm of study that stands outside the realm of study being examined; or an attempt to use the methods of one discipline to understand the substance of another discipline, or an attempt to draw from one or more disciplines to answer questions of law that are not answered fully by any one discipline. In this course, we will encounter interdisciplinary, disciplinary, and/or multidisciplinary approaches toward the study of law.

This seminar is for students who would like to revise a manuscript on a topic related to the study of race and justice. These manuscripts can be articles, dissertation chapters, master’s theses, or other forms of writing that reflect substantial research, theory and analysis relevant to race and justice studies. Students will meet weekly for “write-in’s” outside of seminar meeting time; and workshop and revise these manuscripts with an eye toward publication during seminar. The seminar will also facilitate discussions on the writing process, publication and engaging in larger debates in the field, and giving and getting critique.

The eighth cohort includes six students, representing schools from across UCI:

Genesis Mazariegos
Adviser: Andrew Highsmith

Genesis Mazariegos is a PhD student in Global Studies. As a life-long Anaheim resident from a marginalized Latinx neighborhood, Genesis is interested in studying the experiences of her Latino neighbors within a city that is divided by global - local tensions. Through the study of global issues that affect her local Latinx community, her project examines how inequalities (of class, space, legal status, race, etc.) are created and impacted by local law and policy.

TJ Mertikas
Adviser: Annie McClanahan

Timothy (TJ) Mertikas is a second year JD student at UCI School of Law. His research interests include work, labor unions, and economic justice. He is particularly interested in examining labor unions as sites of real utopia. He works to envision how these real utopias can utilize traditional organizational networks to build expansive theories of organizing centered on a broader notion of economic justice for workers.

Kennedy Myers
Adviser: Felix Jean-Louis III

Gabi Straughn
Adviser: Alicia Carroll

Gabi Straughn is a second year PhD student in the history department. Her work focuses on freedom petitions filed by Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race women during the colonial and antebellum periods in the U.S. She is particularly interested in the different methods and approaches these women took to argue for their freedom based on either race or being illegally enslaved.

Jes Torres Baker
Adviser: Anita Casavantes Bradford

Jes Torres Baker is a third year PhD student in the department of Urban Planning and Public Policy. Her research focuses on victimization and immigration policy at both the federal and local levels. She uses quantitative causal methods to assess the impacts that various humanitarian visas have on different outcomes such as reporting rates and labor market opportunities for undocumented people.

Kyle Winnen
Adviser: Mario Barnes

Kyle Winnen is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on systemic injustice and the effects of policy and language on the perpetuation of inequality within the criminal legal system. His current research examines prosecutorial language in closing arguments of criminal cases where rap lyrics or videos have been introduced as evidence against the defendant to better understand how the introduction of such evidence impacts stereotype attribution and risks stigmatizing defendants.

Contacts

Rabie Kadri
Law Centers Manager
rkadri@law.uci.edu
(949) 824-2370