FACULTY RESEARCH
Paul COllins
Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science
Paul Collins is currently working on two large-scale projects. The first is funded by a grant from the Law and Science Program of the National Science Foundation and is coauthored with Chris Bailey, Doug Rice, and Jesse Rhodes. This project examines how legal issues rise and fall on the agendas of LGBTQ+ media, how the legal consciousness of the LGBTQ+ community develops over time, and how legal decisions influence public awareness and attitudes toward law and legal actors.
The second project, coauthored with Christina Boyd and Lori Ringhand, is comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Drawing on their deep knowledge of the confirmation hearings, as well as rich new qualitative and quantitative evidence, the researchers highlight how the women and people of color who have sat before the Committee have faced a significantly different confirmation process than their white, male colleagues. Despite being among the most qualified and well-credentialed lawyers of their respective generations, female and racial minority nominees face more skepticism of their professional competence, are more frequently interrupted by questioning senators, are described in gender and race-tinged ways, and are subjected to stereotype-based questioning.
The second project, coauthored with Christina Boyd and Lori Ringhand, is comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Drawing on their deep knowledge of the confirmation hearings, as well as rich new qualitative and quantitative evidence, the researchers highlight how the women and people of color who have sat before the Committee have faced a significantly different confirmation process than their white, male colleagues. Despite being among the most qualified and well-credentialed lawyers of their respective generations, female and racial minority nominees face more skepticism of their professional competence, are more frequently interrupted by questioning senators, are described in gender and race-tinged ways, and are subjected to stereotype-based questioning.
Rebecca hamlin
Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science
Rebecca Hamin has a new book, Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move, Stanford University Press (2021) https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31446&bottom_ref=subject. She also has three ongoing research projects: First is the “No Safe Haven” project, which I have been working on with my colleague Jamie Rowen (Political Science & Legal Studies, UMass Amherst) for the past several years. The “No Safe Haven” project examines the growing global regime that has developed to prevent alleged human rights violators and war criminals from accessing immigration benefits in Global North states. At the heart of this research agenda is an interest in the ways in which migrants are cast as deserving or undeserving, and the difficulties in distinguishing between victims and perpetrators during conflict.
My second current research project is an active partnership with the Colombian government’s Victims Unit. This project focuses on a concept which I am calling “diasporic citizenship,” the ways in which a state maintains relationships with its citizens abroad. This project is particularly concerned with those who have fled conflict or violence, but who maintain ties to their home state. Much of the literature on migrant ties to their home country treats the citizens abroad as economic actors who send home remittances. But people who flee conflict also maintain ties to home, and take an active interest in transitional justice policies. For this project I am again working with Jamie Rowen and also Luz Maria Sanchez Duque, a graduate student in political science at UMass Amherst.
The third area of research I am currently engaged in is a new project on the relationship between migration studies and settler colonialism. Migration studies has historically not engaged with colonialism as a driver of migration, nor has it conceptualized the forced displacement of indigenous people as a form of forced migration.
My second current research project is an active partnership with the Colombian government’s Victims Unit. This project focuses on a concept which I am calling “diasporic citizenship,” the ways in which a state maintains relationships with its citizens abroad. This project is particularly concerned with those who have fled conflict or violence, but who maintain ties to their home state. Much of the literature on migrant ties to their home country treats the citizens abroad as economic actors who send home remittances. But people who flee conflict also maintain ties to home, and take an active interest in transitional justice policies. For this project I am again working with Jamie Rowen and also Luz Maria Sanchez Duque, a graduate student in political science at UMass Amherst.
The third area of research I am currently engaged in is a new project on the relationship between migration studies and settler colonialism. Migration studies has historically not engaged with colonialism as a driver of migration, nor has it conceptualized the forced displacement of indigenous people as a form of forced migration.
Sindiso MnisiWeeks
Associate Professor of Legal Studies
As demonstrated in her book, Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa (Routledge, 2018), which focused on the pursuit of justice and human security in indigenous courts by poor women and men living in rural South Africa, Sindiso MnisiWeeks uses community-based participatory and action-research methods to address inequities of participation in decision-making, governance, and access to justice for poor, indigenous rural women and men under the democratic constitution of her home country of South Africa. Her current projects include authoring Alter-Native Constitutionalism: Decolonising ‘Common’ Law, Transforming South Africa (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023) and co-authoring The Rule of Law in South Africa (Hart Publishing, forthcoming 2023) with Professors Heinz Klug and Sanele Sibanda. She is also developing the proposal for a new monograph whose working title is Behind the Veil of Isidwaba: Rural South African Women Lay Down the Law, which consolidates the gendered lessons from her 17 years of work on women, property, governance, dispute management, and participation under indigenous law and the South African Constitution.
Broadly speaking, Dr. MnisiWeeks’s research focuses on law, policy, education, and advocacy on indigenous rights, economic and social inequality, and constitutionalism in South Africa and beyond. Through it –– for instance, in the textbooks on African customary law (Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 1st ed. 2015; 2nd ed. forthcoming 2023), South African constitutional law (OUPSA, 2021), and South African family law (OUPSA, 2021), as well as handbooks on law and anthropology (OUP, 2021) and social movements (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2023), that she has co-authored and/or contributed to –– she has emphasized and tried to reconcile the tensions between the ‘law on the books’ and ‘law in action’. She has thereby contributed to developing the thinking of lawyers, law- and policy-makers, and judges, as well as training law students, specifically seeking to encourage students to critically engage human rights and public policy toward constructive solutions to emergent global justice problems.
Even though her work is most deeply grounded in South Africa, the issues it canvasses are global in nature and have profound resonance in the United States. Dr. MnisiWeeks has had the opportunity to see this firsthand in her seven years of co-establishing the Boston Human Rights City Initiative (BHRCI) and partnering with the Boston Mayor’s Office as well as the Boston Human Rights Commission whose resuscitation in 2020 the BHRCI’s efforts helped activate. She continues to support the UMass Boston student interns who support the work of the Commission and is collaborating with them and other students on publications produced based on lessons learned from those action-research experiences.
Lastly, Dr. MnisiWeeks is committed to the internationalization and diversification of demographic and linguistic representation in the scholarship on law and society as evidence through her current projects of co-editing one of the American Anthropological Association’s official journals, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and guest editing a special issue of the South African Journal on Human Rights, titled Lost in Translation: Justice and Rights in South Africa’s Many Languages (forthcoming 2023).
Broadly speaking, Dr. MnisiWeeks’s research focuses on law, policy, education, and advocacy on indigenous rights, economic and social inequality, and constitutionalism in South Africa and beyond. Through it –– for instance, in the textbooks on African customary law (Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 1st ed. 2015; 2nd ed. forthcoming 2023), South African constitutional law (OUPSA, 2021), and South African family law (OUPSA, 2021), as well as handbooks on law and anthropology (OUP, 2021) and social movements (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2023), that she has co-authored and/or contributed to –– she has emphasized and tried to reconcile the tensions between the ‘law on the books’ and ‘law in action’. She has thereby contributed to developing the thinking of lawyers, law- and policy-makers, and judges, as well as training law students, specifically seeking to encourage students to critically engage human rights and public policy toward constructive solutions to emergent global justice problems.
Even though her work is most deeply grounded in South Africa, the issues it canvasses are global in nature and have profound resonance in the United States. Dr. MnisiWeeks has had the opportunity to see this firsthand in her seven years of co-establishing the Boston Human Rights City Initiative (BHRCI) and partnering with the Boston Mayor’s Office as well as the Boston Human Rights Commission whose resuscitation in 2020 the BHRCI’s efforts helped activate. She continues to support the UMass Boston student interns who support the work of the Commission and is collaborating with them and other students on publications produced based on lessons learned from those action-research experiences.
Lastly, Dr. MnisiWeeks is committed to the internationalization and diversification of demographic and linguistic representation in the scholarship on law and society as evidence through her current projects of co-editing one of the American Anthropological Association’s official journals, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and guest editing a special issue of the South African Journal on Human Rights, titled Lost in Translation: Justice and Rights in South Africa’s Many Languages (forthcoming 2023).
Douglas Rice
Associate Professor of Political Science
Professor Rice's research focuses on judicial policymaking and inequality in the law. Throughout his work, he seeks to develop theoretically and empirically appropriate measures and approaches, often employing tools from computational social science. In one current project, he is working, along with other center affiliates, to understand change in the legal consciousness of LGBTQ+ communities as evidenced by coverage of courts and legal issues in LGBTQ+ media over time. In other ongoing work, he and co-authors examine racial bias in judicial opinions as well as congressional speech, gender inequality in U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, and the automated measurement of legal rules from rich text.
Leah Wing
Senior Lecturer II of Legal Studies
Co-director, National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution
Co-director, National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution
Leah is Senior Lecturer II on the faculty in the Legal Studies Program. Interrogating the relationship between disputing and justice, her areas of concentration are the impact of identity, inequality, and technology on the transformation of conflict and furtherance of justice through dispute resolution processes in offline and online geographies. Her current research projects include AI, ethics and dispute resolution, crowdsourcing and spatial justice, technological responses to disaster and digital harm doing. She recently completed three National Science Foundation funded research projects on online dispute resolution with multidisciplinary and multi-institutional research teams.
Leah is co-director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR), founding board member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR), and founded and directs the Art of Conflict Transformation Event Series at UMASS Amherst. Since 2007 it has brought together over 3000 scholars, artists, conflict resolvers, and students to explore the geography of conflict; the spaces in and on which conflict has been imprinted and expressed, and the emerging terrains of resistance, resilience, and transformation. Leah is a member of Healing Through Remembering (Belfast).
Leah’s recent publications are listed here.
Leah is co-director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR), founding board member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR), and founded and directs the Art of Conflict Transformation Event Series at UMASS Amherst. Since 2007 it has brought together over 3000 scholars, artists, conflict resolvers, and students to explore the geography of conflict; the spaces in and on which conflict has been imprinted and expressed, and the emerging terrains of resistance, resilience, and transformation. Leah is a member of Healing Through Remembering (Belfast).
Leah’s recent publications are listed here.
youngmin yi
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dr. Youngmin (Min) Yi’s work currently focuses on family inequality in the United States (U.S.), with particular interest in the intersection of family life with racialized systems of social control in the United States (U.S.), namely the criminal legal, child welfare, and immigration systems. As a sociologist and demographer, she aims to situate the experiences of individuals, families, and communities in broader social context, using quantitative data and methods to do so. Her recent and ongoing research investigates an array of topics including, but not limited to: (1) the unequal risk and health consequences of family member incarceration, (2) institutional contact and change and instability in young people’s living arrangements, and, more recently, (3) linkages across the predatory lending, incarceration, and child welfare systems and how they vary spatially, and (4) the social construction of race/ethnicity in administrative data.