Student

Silvia Fregoni

Silvia Fregoni is a Lloyd M. Robbins JSD Fellow and 2022 Miller-ASIL Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law. Fregoni’s research focuses on corporate law, law and economics, and international law. She has a particular interest in applying social science and quantitative research methods to explore a variety of topics in these areas, such as the...

Alinaya Sybilla Fabros

PhD Candidate
Sociology

Alinaya Fabros is a PhD candidate in Sociology studying labor globalization, political economy and transnational social reproduction. Her dissertation examines how a transnational working class is formed and maintained across generations, with a rare comparative analysis of the Philippine state's labor emigration policy and its village-level implementation since the 1974 New Labor Code--the law often cited for producing the most globalized labor force on the planet and generating the emigration governance model currently replicated in developing countries worldwide. Prior to entering...

Karen Villegas

BELS Fellow

Karen Villegas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Karen’s dissertation analyzes the ways in which economic and language ideologies work together to socialize aspiring U.S. citizens to be literate in a ‘neoliberal’ ideation of citizenship. The context of the study is an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL), citizenship course with a focus on the social organization of the practices, the ideologies indexed in these practices, and the ensuing formations of literacies produced in these settings. Karen received her M.A...

Yael Plitmann

Yael Plitmann is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley. She studies the intersection of education, religion and organizations, and combines sociological research methods and organizational theory with perspectives from law and the humanities. Yael holds degrees from Tel Aviv university and Yale law school.

Yen-Tung Lin

Yen-Tung Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and focuses primarily on the sociology of law and human rights studies. Before coming to Berkeley, he worked in a human rights organization in Taiwan.

His research compares how human rights law on solitary confinement shapes institutions in California, Denmark, and Taiwan. Departing from the current consensus that civil society is essential for human rights law to make an impact, he explores how power relations within the state apparatus...

Dvir Yogev

As a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley, my academic research focuses on understanding the interplay between citizens' perceptions of justice in a democratic society and the responsiveness of our representative system. My research methodology leverages public opinion, administrative data, and election outcomes to elucidate the connections between voters' attitudes and accountability in the justice system. The significance of my research lies in its capacity to demonstrate the effect of local elections and voters' preferences on the conduct of law enforcement...

Dvir Yogev

BELS Fellow
After a short learning period with inspiring lawyers of the Israeli National Public Defense department, Dvir Yogev came to Berkeley in the pursuit of higher education and an immersive research environment. He researches discretionary parole, emerging technologies in the criminal justice system, and the politics of criminal justice policy change. He asks, mainly, how do people form preferences for criminal justice policy, and how to solve the puzzle of a responsive yet not punitive punishment in a representative democracy. He applies behavioral science approaches to the study of individuals'...