John Bliss is an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and an affiliate faculty member at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession where he previously spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow. Before joining the Denver Law faculty, he completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Professor Bliss’ research empirically examines the relationship between lawyers’ professional identities and their public-interest values. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative analysis, he has studied how law students adopt professional selves while “drifting” away from init ..read more

Alexandra Huneeus is the Evjue Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her PhD, JD and BA from University of California, Berkeley, and was a post-doc at Stanford University’s Center on Development, Democracy and the Rule of Law. Professor Huneeus’s scholarship focuses on international law and human rights, with emphasis on Latin America.  Her work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Law and Social Inquiry, Yale Journal of International Law, Leiden International Law Jour ..read more

Deepa Das Acevedo is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law.  In addition to being a legal anthropologist, she is a Trustee of the Law & Society Association (Class of 2024), an Associate Editor for the Law & Society Review, a Contributing Editor to the Work Law section of JOTWELL, and a member of the advisory board for Law & Social Inquiry. Professor Acevedo’s research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights about legal rules and institutions.  In addi ..read more

This episode presents an interview with Professors Riaz Tejani and Emily Taylor Poppe, who recently became co-chairs of the Law and Society Association’s New Legal Realism Collaborative Research Network (CRN). Recorded in advance of the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Tejani and Taylor Poppe discuss the panels sponsored this year by the NLR CRN as well as their plans for the CRN going forward. In addition, they each share how NLR perspectives have informed their research agendas and their teaching in different institutional contexts. Coming from different disciplin ..read more

Season two of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars.  This third episode presents an interview with Professor Shauhin Talesh, who has recently co-edited a book with Elizabeth Mertz and Heinz Klug titled Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism.  In this podcast, he explains how NLR fits within his pathbreaking work on how private organizations shape and influence the content and meaning of legislation and regulation.  In particular, he discusses how private organizations respond to legal regulations and what impact such responses have on civil ..read more

Season 2 of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars.  This second episode presents an interview with Professor Bernadette Atuahene, who has written about New Legal Realism movement in an article in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.  In this podcast, she explains how NLR fits with her pathbreaking work on property rights in South Africa and in Detroit.  She is featured in the upcoming Research Handbook of Modern Legal Realism (2021) as a “Llewellyn and Mentschikoff” figure of today’s realism because of ..read more

Season 2 of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars, kicking off with April Faith-Slaker’s interview of Thomas Mitchell.  Professor Mitchell is a leading figure in the New Legal Realism movement, from the inaugural Wisconsin Law Review NLR Symposium in 2005, to the signal edited NLR volumes from Cambridge University Press in 2016.  He is featured in the upcoming Research Handbook of Modern Legal Realism (2021) as a “Llewellyn and Mentschikoff” figure of today’s realism because of his work combining legal theory, empirical research, and ..read more

In the fourth episode of our NLR podcast series, April Faith-Slaker talks with Stewart Macaulay (Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School) and Elizabeth Mertz (Senior Research Faculty at the American Bar Foundation and Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Wisconsin Law School).  Macaulay and Mertz are co-editors (with Thomas W. Mitchell) of The New Legal Realism, Vol. I: Translating Law-and-Society for Today’s Legal Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016).  In this podcast, they discuss the law and society and new legal realism movements as wel ..read more

In our third NLR podcast, Elizabeth Mertz interviews Sally Engle Merry, Silver Professor of Anthropology at NYU and former President of the Law & Society Association. In addition, she has served as President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and the American Ethnological Association, and as Co-Editor of PoLAR:  Political and Anthropology Review.  Winner of both the Kalven and the Hurst prizes from the Law & Society Association, she is a prolific scholar.  She  is also co-editor (with Heinz Klug) of The New Legal Realism, Vol. II ..read more

In the second of our NLR podcast series, April Faith-Slaker talks with Heinz Klug, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.  He is co-editor (with Sally Engle Merry) of The New Legal Realism, Vol. II: Studying Law Globally (Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Here he discusses the second volume and his thoughts on what the new legal realist approach can contribute to the understanding of law across the globe ..read more