Taavi Annus is a Docent at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research focuses on Estonian and comparative constitutional law. He holds a Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Tartu. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law and Jahrbuch des Öffentlichen Rechts.
Julie E. Artis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at DePaul University. Her current research examines judicial views of joint custody and the link between cohabitation and well-being among young children. Her recent work, an examination of the decline in women's household labor (with Eliza K. Pavalko), appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family.
Gad Barzilai is Professor of Political Science and Law and the Co-Director of the Law, Politics, and Society Program at Tel Aviv University. He is a Visiting Professor in the CLASS (Comparative Law and Society Studies Center) and in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. His articles have been published in American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Law & Courts, Publius, and Government & Opposition. Recent publications include an article in Austin Sarat (ed.), Companion to Law and Society (Blackwell, 2004) and his book Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2003).
Lauren Benton is Professor of History at New York University. Her publications include Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900, which won the 2003 Book Award from the World History Association and the 2003 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. Benton received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History at Johns Hopkins University.
Paul M. Collins Jr. is Instructor of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Binghamton University. His research interests include interest group participation in the federal courts, judicial decisionmaking, and litigant success. His dissertation examines the relationship between amicus curiae briefs and the voting behavior of U.S. Supreme Court justices. He is a past recipient of the 2002 and 2003 (with Lisa A. Solowiej) Congressional Quarterly Press Awards from the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association.
Jean Kovath is an independent scholar. Her main interests are survey research and evaluation. She served as a senior research analyst in the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis at the City University of New York, where she was the editor of the CUNY Data book. Her work with Carroll Seron includes “The Impact of Legal Counsel on Outcomes for Poor Tenants in New York City's Housing Court: Results of a Randomized Experiment” (with Gregg Van Ryzin and Martin Frankel, Law & Society Review, vol. 35, 2001).
Erik Larson is an assistant professor of sociology at Macalester College. His research compares the development of economic activity in different national contexts in relation to processes of globalization. The project from which this article is derived compares the development and operation of small stock exchanges. In addition to this project, he is engaged in collaborative research on the politics and debates surrounding economic indigenization and affirmative action policies targeted toward groups identified as indigenous in national contexts.
Bill Maurer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (Princeton Univ. Press, forthcoming), and Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997).
Sally Engle Merry is Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College. Her book, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. Her most recent book is Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai'i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004). She is a past president of the Law and Society Association.
Kunal Parker is Associate Professor of Law at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University. He is currently completing a dissertation in history at Princeton University on conceptions of custom in the nineteenth-century United States. He has published articles and essays relating to legal constructions of gender and sexuality in colonial India, immigration restriction in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, and forms of legal thought in the late nineteenth-century United States.
Joseph A. Pereira is Director of the CUNY Data Service at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. As head of the oldest census affiliate in New York State, he has undertaken numerous analyses of census data that focus on racial and ethnic minorities in urban America. He has an interest in evaluating the experience of racial and ethnic minorities within major urban social institutions including higher education, the federal courts, and the welfare system. In 2000, he completed a national study of Latino community-based organizations. He has also used the factorial survey approach to study who should be supported by public assistance and what a fair public assistance payment is.
Carroll Seron is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College and the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has a long-standing interest in the sociology of the professions and is the author of a number of books in this field, of which The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (with Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Bonnie Oglensky, and Robert Saute, Routledge, 1999) is her most recent. Currently, she is co-principal investigator on a five-year panel study of the socialization processes of engineers that is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Ronen Shamir is Associate Professor and Director of the Social Research Institute of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He is author of Managing Legal Uncertainty (Duke Univ. Press, 1995) and The Colonies of Law (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), as well as articles in leading academic journals. Previous research has focused on the legal profession and judicial politics, bringing together the sociology of law and political-historical sociology. Current research, supported by the Israeli Science Foundation, focuses on the discursive field constructed around the notion of corporate social responsibility. Shamir is spending his 2004–2005 sabbatical year at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Margit Tavits is a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the development of democratic institutions. Her previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, American Journal of Political Science, and other journals.
Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College and outgoing Review Essays Editor for Law & Society Review. Most generally, her research addresses the intersection of law and culture, both historically and theoretically.
