The primary goal of the CLASS Center is to generate and help support, both intellectually and financially, innovative socio-legal scholarship by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at the University of Washington. Such support includes but is not limited to:

• facilitation of routine exchanges among researchers, academic units, and other existing centers;
• sponsorship of an ongoing colloquia series, reading groups, and the like among campus scholars;
• collaboration with specific units and other programs to bring visiting socio-legal scholars to our campus;
• direct funding of various research projects;
• sponsorship of theme-based conferences, such as the past "Law and Globalization" and "Boundaries and Belonging" conferences;
• outreach to relevant community constituencies;
• extensive fund-raising from local organizations (ABA), individual alumni, and friends; and
• provision of support for faculty and graduate student research grant and fellowship submission.

The site calendar provides dates of recent and upcoming events related to research and intellectual exchange.

Collaborative Research

Dealing with Disorder

This project is a collaboration of Professors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert. It examines the various means by which the homeless and other marginalized occupants of urban public space are being spatially regulated in cities like Seattle. We are particularly interested in various means by which mere presence in space is now an illegal activity. A number of expansions of trespass law are being employed that make it easier for the police to monitor, question, search and arrest those who occupy public space. In this project, which is funded by the Open Society Institute, we will draw upon a wide array of data sources: arrest records and reports; participant observations; and interviews with police, prosecutors, public defenders, political officials, citizen activists, and those who the targets of these spatial restrictions. One article from this project is in press with the journal, Theoretical Criminology, another is under review at Studies in Law, Politics and Society, and a book manuscript is in the early stages ofproduction.

Recent Research Projects

Boundaries and Belonging.
PI: Joel Migdal.

The Cause Lawyering Project.
PI: Stuart Scheingold.

This project was initiated in the early 1990s by Stuart Scheingold, with Austin Sarat (Amherst College). The goal has been to study the political engagements of lawyers who use their legal skills, prestige, and position to advance particular, mostly progressive visions of the good society. This project has enlisted several dozen international scholars who have met in a series of specialized conferences around the world as well as in special panels at the annual Law and Society Association meetings. The research enterprise resulted in an initial volume, Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities (Oxford, 1998), which addressed a wide array of issues regarding the tensions of political and professional commitments, the motives and contexts of cause lawyers, and the varieties of cause lawyering activity. A second volume, Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era (Oxford, 2001), extended the study further to contexts around the globe amidst contradictory forces of democratization, neo-liberalism, and global capital expansion. Both of the first two volumes were supported by NSF. A third volume in the series presently is in the planning stages.

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Ongoing Research Projects

Law's Lore: Tort Reform, Mass Media, and the Production of Legal Knowledge.
PIs: Michael McCann and William Haltom (UPS).

This project addresses the politics of tort reform mass media coverage of civil litigation, and the complex processes by which legal "stories" are generated and circulated in society. The research combines quantititative and qualitative study of mass produced "texts' that are systemtically evaluated according to an innovative "framing" methodology. The project has been funded by NSF and has employed half a dozen graduate students and over a dozen undergraduates from 1999-2001. The book product is expected to be published in late 2002.

Regulating Midwifery: Law, Medicine, and the Cultural Meaning(s) of Childbirth.
PI: Katherine Beckett.

Associate Professor Katharine Beckett leads this project analyzing the debate between those seeking to expand women¹s birthing options to include home birth and midwifery services and others who seek to ensure that women continue to give birth in hospital settings under the supervision of physicians. This conflict is unfolding in the media, legislatures, and courtrooms across the United States, and is part of a much larger dispute regarding the medical approach to childbirth, the authority and knowledge of those who espouse it, the virtues and dangers of technology, and the proper role of the state, the law, and organized medicine in reproductive and family matters. The purpose of the larger project is to identify and analyze the various perspectives on childbirth that coexist in U.S. culture, and to analyze how these alternative perspectives are being adjudicated in legal forums. In particular, the analysis seeks to explain why midwives and their supporters are sometimes able, despite the far greater financial, political, and organizational resources of the medical establishment, to achieve their goals. Toward this end, the study interrogates representations of childbirth in a variety of media, interview activists and legislators involved in legislative debates in various states, analyze court cases involving prosecutions of midwives, and consider the statutory history of the laws that regulate childbirth. This project has been funded by the Royalty Research Fellowship program at the University of Washington.

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Future Projects

The State of Rights.
PI: Michael McCann and Howard Gillman (USC).

We plan a conference addressing the evolution of civil rights and liberties in the twentieth century American administrative state. The project will combine up to a dozen essays by leading scholars in the new historical institutionalist tradition. A conference is planned in spring, 2002.

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Working Papers