Myrna Dawson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on social and legal responses to violent victimization. Her publications have appeared in The British Journal of Criminology (forthcoming in 2003), Social Problems, Justice Quarterly, Homicide Studies, and Resources for Feminist Research. Her current research projects examine how three decades of social change experienced by Canadian women may be contributing to changing patterns in violent victimization and how the implementation of specialized or “problem-solving” courts may be transforming the organizational culture of legal professionals in the Canadian criminal justice system.
Albert W. Dzur is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bowling Green State University. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he held the Commonwealth Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and taught at the University of Utah and at Western Michigan University. His research examines the value of lay participation in professional and expert domains, such as citizen boards in criminal justice, public forums in journalism, and ethics committees in medicine. He has published a dozen articles on this and other research in leading journals of political science and philosophy such as Polity, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Criminal Justice Ethics, and Political Research Quarterly. He is completing a book entitled Democratic Professionalism.
Michael E. Ezell is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His research interests are in criminology, juvenile delinquency, and quantitative methods. His primary area of research focuses on the chronic offender population, with an emphasis on their longitudinal offending patterns.
James L. Gibson is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies mass behavior and democratization in the United States, Europe, and Africa. He is interested in understanding why ordinary people think the way they do about political issues (especially political tolerance) and how such thinking translates into public policy and democratic reform. He has published more than 100 refereed articles in a wide range of national and international social scientific journals, including all of the leading political science journals. He has also published five books, the latest being Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion (with Amanda Gouws, Cambridge University Press). His next book, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? is forthcoming. He is currently working on a new study of the problem of historical injustices and land reconciliation in South Africa.
Kenneth C. Land is the John Franklin Crowell Professor of Sociology at Duke University. He is a social statistician who does research on statistical models and methods and conducts substantive studies in criminology and demography. He has made contributions to the study of crime opportunity/routine activities theory and to the study of delinquent/criminal careers.
Daniel Linz received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He shares a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and the Law and Society program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research involves empirically testing assumptions made by the law and legal actors in the area of the First Amendment. His research spans the topics of media violence, pornography, and sexual depictions and pretrial publicity, news, and race.
Peter J. May is Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, where he is affiliated with the Center for American Politics and Public Policy. His current research addresses public policy processes and environmental regulatory policy. His research addressing regulatory enforcement and compliance has appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and Law and Policy.
Susan M. Olson is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Vice President for Faculty at the University of Utah. Her research interests focus on citizen mobilization of the legal system in contexts such as social reform litigation, ordinary civil litigation, judicial elections, and informal justice. She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association and published in Law & Society Review, Journal of Politics, Law and Policy, Justice System Journal, Polity, and Judicature.
Bryant Paul is Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on using social scientific methods to test legal assumptions concerning communication, mass media and behavior, as well as the social and psychological effects of sexually oriented media messages.
Jay R. Williams is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. He is a sociologist who does research in criminology. He also is a consultant who conducts evaluation research studies in juvenile and criminal justice.
