Drawing on courtroom observation, archival analysis, and in-depth interviews with legal actors, defendants, program staff, and advocates, the dissertation traces how alternatives to incarceration, intervention mandates, and discretionary plea negotiations shape the everyday meaning of accountability in these cases. Situating domestic violence courts alongside the parallel architecture of drug and mental health courts, Aarushi examines the uneven fit between intimate partner violence and the rehabilitative and problem-solving frameworks increasingly adopted across the criminal legal system. Her work engages scholarship on street-level bureaucracy, legal social construction, therapeutic jurisprudence, and feminist theories of visibility, interpretation, and evidence.

Aarushi is particularly interested in ethnography as a method for examining how institutional practices reproduce social inequalities through ordinary bureaucratic routines and discretionary decision-making. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF GRFP), the National Institutes of Health (T32 in Gender, Sexuality and Health), and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Before beginning her doctoral work, she received her BA in Social Anthropology and Global Health from Harvard College.

Her dissertation, Legal Consciousness and the Side Effects of Abortion Bans: Genetic Counselors’ Perspectives on Navigating Abortion Law in the Post-Dobbs Era, investigates how abortion restrictions reshape prenatal care through the everyday work of genetic counselors. Drawing on in-depth interviews, she explores how counselors interpret abortion law and how these interpretations shape clinical decision-making, professional relationships, and patient care. By centering providers’ interpretive work, the study shows how law is enacted in practice and its implications for equity,  access, and health care workforce sustainability.

Her research has been supported by the Society of Family Planning, the UCSF Newcomer Health Policy Scholarship, and the UCSF Strauss Dissertation Scholarship. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

As a first-generation Latina sociologist with prior juvenile justice involvement, Jaqueline is dedicated to mentoring system-impacted youth. During her fieldwork, she served as a college instructor, tutor, and mentor to incarcerated youth in a Southern California juvenile detention facility.

Jaqueline’s research has received support from the National Science Foundation, along with UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Fellowship and the UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship. She holds an M.A. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara.

Catherine’s scholarship appears in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Qualitative Research, and has previously been supported by the Ford Foundation and the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.

Michael is also an organizer with mutual aid and abolitionist organizations in Los Angeles. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and BA from Vassar College.

Grounded in the Rio Grande Valley and Southeast Texas, Orlando Lara’s dissertation focuses on the growth of identity precarity and insecurity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and US passports. While research on liminal non-citizen statuses has flourished in recent years, his ethnographic and archival research opens new ground in the study of the ongoing and intensifying challenges to legal citizenship and other forms of purportedly ‘legal’ status, including birthright citizenship itself.

Working with the artist Delilah Montoya, he co-created “Sed: A Trail of Thirst” and, with the Sin Huellas Artist Collective, the multimedia installation, “Detention Nation.”

Their article, “‘Sex Changed by a Court’s Decree’: The History-and-Tradition of Gender Transitions in the United States,” is forthcoming in Georgetown Law Journal. Outside UC Berkeley, Brianne teaches free online queer history classes open to the community. They also volunteer for the Monroe County History Center’s project on the queer history of Bloomington.

Their work has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. They have a JD from Berkeley Law and a BA from Columbia University.

Her dissertation investigates the origins and persistence of segregated pregnancy care in the U.S. Using legal and historical methods, she traces how segregation by race and class was created and sustained from Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era; how it was reconfigured through the design of the Medicaid program and reinforced through health care financing; and how medical education contributes to the normalization of segregated care.

Jennifer’s qualitative research focuses on perinatal care at two university medical centers: one using a traditional model that assigns Medicaid patients to resident-run clinics, and a second that adopted a payer-integrated model, blinding insurance at intake. Through interviews and fieldwork, she explores how providers and trainees experience these different models.

Jennifer holds a J.D. from UC Law SF and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. She co-founded the California Abortion Alliance and served as its Director from 2007 to 2021.

Daniela researches the history of trans and gender diverse people of color in the twentieth century United States. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of LGBTQ history, labor and working-class politics, and Black and Brown liberation movements.

Based on extensive research in the archives of criminalization of New York City and oral histories with trans and gender nonconforming people of color, Valdes’s dissertation offers a grassroots social history of working-class Black and Brown gender diverse New Yorkers from the Great Migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans at midcentury to the early twenty-first century. Her dissertation is a working-class history that broaches forms of survival and resistance, including participation in the informal economy. Additionally, she examines the under-researched historical connections between the carceral state and psychiatry showing how the era of mass public-order policing underwrote the criminalization and pathologization of racialized, queered, and disabled people that continues to this day.

Daniela is a gender nonconforming Latino scholar with over a decade of community engagement and activism in the trans and queer communities of the Northeastern United States. She serves as the chair of the community advisory board for “Y’all Better Quiet Down”: Trans BIPOC Digitization Initiative” of the Digital Transgender Archive. Previously, she worked with the Rikers Public Memory Project where she co-created the documentary Story by Story: Building A People’s History of Rikers Island.

Irene was first trained as a sociologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She received an M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her previous work has informed policies that address gender and health inequality in Perú and has been published in multiple academic and media outlets.