Student

Brie McLemore

Brie McLemore is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation situates smart street lights, which are equipped with cameras and automatic license plate readers, as a proxy for understanding how technologies became a tool of the Carceral State, even when this was not their intended use, and the consequences for the right to privacy. The Frances S. Coles summer research grant will support the development of her dissertation chapter, titled “‘The Supreme Court is Not Going to Save Us:’...

Carlotta Wright de la Cal

BELS Fellow

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the historical intersections of corporate power, infrastructure expansion, Indigenous sovereignty, and immigration law. Focusing on railroad corporations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, her dissertation project examines how Indigenous and migrant workers navigated, repurposed, and resisted overlapping systems of legal and corporate control. Prior to Berkeley, she received a B.A. in History and an M.Phil. in American History from the...

Caylee Hong

Caylee Hong is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she researches urban oil production in the Los Angeles Basin. Prior to Berkeley, Caylee clerked at the Federal Court of Canada and worked as a project finance attorney in New York City. She will be joining the University of Alberta Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor next summer.

Bonnie Cherry

Bonnie Cherry is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her work explores the martial origins of the administrative state, and how the management of Indian affairs shaped civilian administrative policies and enforcement mechanisms from the earliest days of the nation. Her dissertation explores how extraordinary security measures taken against Native peoples and their lands inspired administrative law and organizational practices, which in turn informed broader security policies. Specifically, her work explores how the...

Claire Wrigley

Claire Wrigley is a PhD candidate in modern European history, specializing in Britain and its empire. Her dissertation, Family, Nation, Empire: An Imperial History of Public Housing in Britain, 1890-2017, argues that the law of public (council) housing was a domestic expression of the politics of empire and decolonization as it was designed to produce stable, productive working-class families who took a particular form, that of the white, heterosexual nuclear family. Drawn from research at over fifteen local and national archives around the UK, her work has been supported by...

Courtney Bither

BELS Fellow

Courtney Bither is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Courtney is a legal historian interested in the relationship between the administrative state, civil rights enforcement, and the religious right in the twentieth-century United States. Her dissertation examines the implementation and enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 and looks to institutes of higher education as spaces where Title VI and Title IX enforcement was unclear or contested. Prior to Berkeley, she...

Cristina Violante

BELS Fellow

Cristina Violante is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law, writing her dissertation on the practice and theory of statutory interpretation in the United States. Her secondary area of research is in property, specifically the history of water law and environmental commodification in settler colonial contexts.

Her work was awarded the American Bar Foundation’s Graduate Student Paper Award and has been published in Law & Social Inquiry and Journal of Palestine...

Dimitri Diagne

BELS Fellow

Dimitri Diagne is a PhD candidate in History at UC Berkeley. He studies how struggles between French administrators, African politicians, and agrarian communities shaped colonial rule in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French West Africa. His research uses changing regimes of agricultural land use in the Delta of the Senegal River as a window into broader questions about property and production under empire, with a particular interest in how Africans used arguments about productivity and labor to assert land rights before colonial authorities. He holds a B.S...

Douglas Sangster

Douglas Sangster is a Ph.D. Candidate at U.C. Berkeley School of Law. He studies the history of health care, disability activism, and law in the United States during the twentieth century. He received funding from the Gottenberg Scholarship Fund (twice) and the Selznick Scholarship Fund while in law school. Douglas has worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission as an Honors Intern and he has volunteered as a student co-director of the Workers Rights' Disability Law Clinic. He earned a law degree from U.C. Berkeley School of Law, a master's degree...

Jiahui Duan

JSD Candidate
JSD

Jiahui Duan is a JSD candidate in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Lloyd M. Robbins Fellow. Her current research studies workplace sexual harassment issues in China, aiming to understand the development of workplace sexual harassment issues in Chinese society and explore a potential anti-sexual harassment route in the emerging economy and political context such as China’s. Her research is built on substantial fieldwork where she conducts in-depth interviews with individual employees who have been harassed and investigates how they...