The Woodrow Wilson School’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) at Princeton University has announced its fellows for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows were selected in a competitive process from a large interdisciplinary and international applicant pool.

Each class of LAPA fellows brings expertise in law and legal studies to Princeton. The fellows spend the academic year working on their own research projects, participating in law-related seminars, engaging with faculty and students pursuing law-related academic inquiries and often teaching in the curricula of various programs on campus. Each fellow will also give a public seminar on their LAPA-supported research project.

The 2016-2017 LAPA Fellows are listed below.

Kathryn Abrams is Herma Hill Kay Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in the areas of feminist legal theory, constitutional law, law and social movements and law and the emotions. Her work has appeared in Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Law and Philosophy, Law and Social Inquiry and Nomos, among others. She is the editor of two special issues: “Witness” for Women’s Studies Quarterly (co-edited with Irene Kacandes in 2008), and “Legal Feminism Now,” for Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011). Her work on feminist theory and activism explores the use of experiential narrative as a form of political and theoretical argumentation, and her work also examines analyzed expressions of women’s partial agency under circumstances of constraint. These early interests fueled a more recent focus on the role of emotion in making legal claims and social movement mobilization. Abrams received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her law degree from Yale University. Her current, empirically-based project examines the mobilization of undocumented immigrants in the anti-immigrant state of Arizona. At LAPA, she will work on a book analyzing the ways that storytelling, tactics of ‘performative citizenship,’ and strategies of emotion management have enabled participants without formal legal status to emerge as confident, effective legal claims-makers under highly adverse political circumstances.

Cornelia H. Dayton Ph.D. ’86 is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Her most recent book, “Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston” (2014), was written with Sharon V. Salinger and won the Merle Curti Award for social history  from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Littleton-Griswold Award in Law and Society from the American Historical Society. She also is the author of “Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789” (1995). Much of her research draws on manuscript court records and involves reconstructing litigants’ life histories. Her research and teaching areas include women, gender and sexuality in the early modern Atlantic; U.S. immigration policy; and 18th-century urban governance and systems of welfare and relief. She holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Princeton. At LAPA, her research will focus on legal, social and cultural responses to mental and cognitive disabilities in New England from 1700 to the founding of the first asylums in the early 1800s, with particular attention to race, gender and class.

James E. Fleming Ph.D. ’88 is The Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, jurisprudence, torts and remedies. He is author or co-author of several books, including “Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution: For Moral Readings and Against Originalisms” (2015); “Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues” (2015) (with Linda C. McClain) and “American Constitutional Interpretation” (5th ed., 2014, co-authored with the late Walter F. Murphy and Stephen Macedo of Princeton University and Sotirios Barber of the University of Notre Dame). Fleming was recently elected president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. He previously served as editor for four volumes of “Nomos,” the annual book of the Society. He received a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School after earning his A.B. at University of Missouri. Before becoming a law professor, he spent five years as a litigator. He also spent a year as a faculty fellow in ethics in the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions (now the Safra Center). At Princeton, he will work on a book on contemporary controversies over law and morality, focusing on the appropriate scope of the enforcement and promotion of morals and public values.

Melynda J. Price is the Robert E. Harding, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law and the director of the African American and Africana Studies program in that university’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on race and citizenship, the politics of punishment and the role of law in the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States and at its borders. She is the author of “At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty” (2015). She has published in the Iowa Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law and other legal journals as well as The New York Times, Tidal Basin Review and Pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture. She also blogs at ivorytowerinterloper.blogspot.com. Price has a doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan. She also earned a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and studied physics as an undergraduate at Prairie View A&M University. At Princeton, she will pursue a project that analyzes how we understand activism among black mothers of murdered children.

David M. Rabban is the Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail, and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair in Law and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. His areas of expertise include the First Amendment, higher education and the law, labor law and legal history. He is author of “Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History” (2013), which was designated a ‘notable title in American intellectual history’ by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, and “Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years” (1997), which received both the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Eli M. Oboler Award from the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Round Table. He has published numerous articles about labor law, the history of free speech and academic freedom. He was general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from 1998 to 2006 and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. Rabban is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Stanford Law School. During his year at LAPA, he will work on a book on the history, theory, and law of academic freedom.

Sarah B. Schindler is a professor of law and the Glassman Faculty Research Scholar at the University of Maine School of Law, where she teaches classes on property, land use, local government, real estate transactions and animal law. Schindler’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of sustainable development and land use law. Two of her recent articles, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment” in the Yale Law Journal and “Banning Lawns” in the George Washington Law Review, were competitively selected for presentation at the Sabin Colloquium on Innovative Environmental Scholarship at Columbia Law School. Her article, “Of Backyard Chickens and Front yard Gardens: The Conflict Between Local Governments and Locavores” (Tulane Law Review), was selected for republication in a compendium of the 10 best land use and environmental law articles of the year. Schindler was named as Pace Environmental Law Center’s Distinguished Young Scholar of 2013. That same year, she received Maine Law’s Professor of the Year award. Schindler received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Georgia Law School. After graduation, she clerked for Judge Will Garwood of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas, and practiced in the area of land use and environmental law. At LAPA, Schindler will examine the exclusionary built environment and the nature of public space.