Catherine Crooke (she/they) is a lawyer and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her dissertation draws on over four years of participant observation and nearly 100 interviews with Los Angeles-based legal service providers to examine the U.S. immigration system as a site of both legal promise and institutional erosion. Foregrounding the everyday experiences of immigration lawyers, she shows how institutional instability reshapes professional practice and transforms the meaning of legality itself. More broadly, her project offers a framework for understanding how professionals sustain moral commitments within institutions marked by constraint.

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.