Matthew Clair

I'm excited to be chairing the American Society for Legal History Projects and Proposals Committee this cycle. We look forward to receiving funding applications for conferences, museum exhibits, pedagogical experiments, and more! We are accepting submissions until Sept. 1.

aslh.net/award/projec...

Abstract: This article reviews cultural sociological approaches to law and considers how they may sharpen analysis of social crises. As the United States faces myriad law-related crises, such as rising authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and police violence, the cultural study of law has become an urgent endeavor. Culture constitutes and shapes law, especially in unsettled times. Five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. Future research would benefit from more precise considerations of how rules and norms operate in unsettled times. One way forward is specifying how frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness shape and are shaped by changing rules and norms. Moreover, future research could leverage each concept to sharpen understandings of social control, inequality, and regulatory compliance in understudied contexts, along understudied axes of stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the law.

A revised version of this paper is forthcoming in Annual Review of Law and Social Science. The article shows how culture constitutes and shapes law and social crisis. The best thing about writing this was the chance to read brilliant work on law, culture, and unsettled times

osf.io/preprints/so...

Seems like an amazing opportunity in these authoritarian times.

bsky.app/profile/sdsc...

THIS. I get an email like this every few weeks. They are selling hard to academic to offload the work to make space for other "more important" work.
But analysis & writing IS the work that honors the voices of intellectual ancestors, centers the participants & connects the two to to build theory

Apply – The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism Apply now for our journalism internship program.

Applications for the summer/fall 2026 session of @thenation.com internship are now open!
🔴 $20/hr, 35 hrs/week
🔴 6 months long, starting June 22
🔴 application deadline April 19
thenationfund.org/apply/

Franklin Research Center Announces the Opening of the Sylvia Wynter Papers, Exhibition, and Symposium - The Devil's Tale Post contributed by John B. Gartrell, director John Hope Franklin Research Center  The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvi...

"The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvia Wynter will be opened to the public beginning March 3." Alt text: photograph of Sylvia Wynter.

Justice after trauma? Race, red tape keep sexual assault victims from compensation Bureaucratic hurdles and racial disparities restrict access to victim compensation for adult survivors of sexual assault, deepen justice system inequities and compound trauma.

Justice after trauma? Race, red tape keep sexual assault victims from compensation

Now on First View: The latest MAH Q&A on how the national crisis in higher ed affects historians of the modern United States. Lauren Jae Gutterman speaks to Julio Capó, Jr., Joan E. Cashin, Alex Lichtenstein, and Melanie Newport.

Read the full Q&A here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our February #LSAMemberSpotlight is Board Trustee @asadasad.bsky.social, @stanfordsoc.bsky.social Asst Professor and author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life. (@princetonupress.bsky.social)

Learn more about Prof Asad here! bit.ly/LSAAsad

Senator Chuck Schumer conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol in May 2025. Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images FORUM How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. Adam Bonica, Jake Grumbach With responses from → Cori Bush, Amanda Litman, Matthew Yglesias, G. Elliott Morris, Julia Serano, Eric Rauchway, Suzanne Mettler & Trevor E. Brown, Thomas Ferguson, Timothy Shenk, Jared Abbott & Milan Loewer, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Lily Geismer, Danielle Wiggins, William A. Galston, and Henry Burke

We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism

www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

About 30 or so Stanford students and faculty eating lunch. A slideshow of books published in the Stanford Sociology Department are displayed on a screen in the background

Prof. Michelle Jackson and Prof. Gi-Wook Shin hold up cupcakes with images of their book covers on top of the icing. Physical copies of their books are in the foreground. A slideshow of other recently published books in the Stanford Sociology Department are in the background

At this week's community lunch, we celebrated faculty books published in the last 5 years, covering a range of social issues from immigration and criminal justice to the division of labor in society and economic development in the Asia-Pacific region.

Front cover of The Division of Rationalized Labor. The cover includes four pictures: pen and paper, microscope, factory tower, police badge. Modern-looking yellow lines and graphs are superimposed.

My new book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, is now shipping! A brief summary of the argument to follow…

Minneapolis Knows How to Resist This Violence From George Floyd to Renee Good, the city has become all too familiar with fatal violence by law enforcement—and it knows exactly how to respond.

I tried to turn my rage yesterday into something that brings us some light. For @newrepublic.com, I wrote about how 2020 prepared Minneapolis for the current crisis of Trump's DHS. newrepublic.com/article/2050...

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

Inequality and moral meaning-making in the admissions consulting profession Abstract. Prior research has described how middle-class and affluent families draw on private supplemental educational resources to help their children mai

New in @socprobsjournal.bsky.social w/ @estelabdiaz.bsky.social: the rapid growth of the admissions consulting industry has raised questions about inequality, privilege, and merit. We combine two original data sources to ask how consultants make sense of their work.
academic.oup.com/socpro/advan...

@npr it’s not a principle. It is a constitutional guarantee.

A wonderful fellowship opportunity for criminal legal scholars at Penn Law. JDs and PhDs are eligible. Apply!

bsky.app/profile/quat...

Former Quattrone Center Fellow @mathuclair.bsky.social shares how the fellowship supported the fieldwork for his book, expanded his network, and shaped his career. If you’re doing justice-focused research, he says: apply!

Deadline: December 31

Learn more + apply: www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/q...

2-yr postdoc opportunity in @ndsociology.bsky.social at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO). iei.nd.edu/initiatives/...

Voters Ousted This Pennsylvania Sheriff After He Signed Up to Collaborate With ICE - Bolts A populous, swing county replaced its GOP sheriff on Tuesday after months of controversy over his joining ICE’s 287(g) program. The Democratic winner promises he’ll end the contract.

A Republican sheriff in a swing county that Trump won by 0.1% signed a contract to help ICE, then lost last week by 11.

New by me in @boltsmag.org: boltsmag.org/sheriff-of-b...

⚡️Coming soon: a special symposium on Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction at 90 organized by @alimeghji.bsky.social & Jose Itzigsohn! Early look at my piece here:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Paid summer research opportunity for undergraduates at MIT. Applicants must be undergraduates at a USA institution. Deadline: Jan 20. Info sessions: 11/6 and 12/10 - mit.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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Republicans Really Don’t Want Journalists Talking About How They’ve Captured the Courts Conservative judges love talking to friendly media outlets. They don’t like talking to anyone who might actually try and hold them accountable.

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”

Declining a press request is one thing

Trying to silence the press entirely is another

ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

Screenshot of tables showing the phone and audio calling rates, as well as video calling rates in prisons and jails

🚨NEW: The FCC has voted to raise calling rates for incarcerated people – a move that bends to the will of telecomm companies, jails and prisons, while saddling poor families with higher costs.

Now, prices could hike as much as 83% 🧵

Are Business Schools Accidentally Turning Away Working-Class Talent? MBA programs risk 'institutional exclusion' when their brands signal elitism, making first-gen & low-income students feel they don’t belong.

This is a great interview with my coauthor @cbrandtner.bsky.social about our recent @sfjournal.bsky.social paper: poetsandquants.com/2025/10/28/a... (the paper can be found here: doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...)

Join Professor Joe Soss on Friday morning to hear about the legal plunder of the justice system. Soss will discuss the origins, operations, and consequences of revenue shifts from communities to governments and corporations.
Join us by registering here → zurl.co/LbUc5

Contributor: The Trump administration is targeting children of color Instead of policies that reduce crime, we get rhetoric of locking up 'bad children.' It's counterproductive and expensive, and it distracts from real solutions that were working before Trump cut their...

New op-ed in the LA Times by myself & Dave Stovall. We wrote this because are watching in horror the ways this administration is terrorizing Children of Color. Black & Brown children deserve better than this. We all deserve better than this. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Q: “Most hospitals + people who will lose insurance are in rural areas. If Trump & Republicans are so intent on sticking it to their own voters, why not let them?”

@aoc.bsky.social : “That’s the difference between us & Trump. I don’t care if you voted for me, I want you to have health care.”

Movement Law Under Fascism As fascist tendencies intensify across the United States, social movements continue to organize against the forces of state repression. Legal scholars must stand with these movements…

Today I wrote in @lpeblog.bsky.social with Amna Akbar & @sameer-ashar.bsky.social about how legal scholars & teachers might act in solidarity with movements in this moment, in the face of fascism: lpeproject.org/blog/movemen...

Texas State upholds the firing of associate history professor Thomas Alter Alter’s termination occurred on Sept. 10, stemming from his remarks at the Revolutionary Socialism Conference on Sept. 7.

I just learned, Thomas Alter, tenured professor, has been terminated effective immediately. Shame on Texas State! We mst build support for Tom. spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-tex...