What is the Legal Disruption Project?
The Legal Disruption Project (LDP) is a participatory action research project housed in the Law and Society major at John Jay College, CUNY. It looks at the way people’s everyday lives are entwined with different forms of governance and power. Democracy requires participation, and the voices of LDP participants point to myriad ways that hegemonic power structures produce exclusion, displacement, and marginalization.
The first phase of LDP involved focus groups run by student RAs from 2019 to 2023. Data analysis is ongoing, but one clear lesson is a need to breach the confinements of what policymakers often see as discrete topics instead of intersecting experiences.
Phase 1 focus groups by the numbers*
414 Participants in recorded focus groups
335 Participants identifying as non-white and/or Latinx/Hispanic
75 Focus groups recorded
62 Countries participants identified as a country of origin
55 Research Assistants from 2019-2023
29 RAs who worked on the project for multiple semesters
Original recruitment poster
Project timeline
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In 2026, JJAY’s Law and Society Program created a new Experiential Learning Course to facilitate LDP research going forward. The course is modeled on an internship structure. It will involve a team of researchers who focus on a specific topic that reflects LDP’s overall focus on the complex ways that law interacts with society.
In Fall 2026, a small group of students will work with faculty to define the first in-depth LDP research topic, which is expected to get underway in Spring 2027.
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With Phase 1 concluded, the LDP paused to take stock and figure out next steps.
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A transition period began in 2024. A small group of RAs and Dr. Carmalt created this website. In addition, the LWS program at JJAY proposed a new course so that future LDP research could be more focused. That course was approved in Spring 2025 and will be on the books in Spring 2026
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In the final year of focus groups, questions begin to emerge about how best to move the project forward from the first phase.
By the end of Fall 2023, 55 student Research Assistants have worked on the project, producing transcripts from 75 focus groups involving over 400 participants.
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With the process of running focus groups now firmly established, the RAs began analyzing the data for each semester.
In Spring and Fall 2022, fifteen RAs worked on the project. Together, they ran 18 focus groups that involved 87 participants. -
The expanded group of RAs and the increased participation in focus groups thanks to their integration into the intro research methods course meant that more data were collected.
Based on an analysis of those data, student RAs started to ask different questions of the focus groups, including: “How would you describe your neighborhood?”, “Do you feel at home in your neighborhood?” and “Have you seen any changes in your neighborhood in recent years?” -
The number of student RAs expanded significantly when the project was offered though a supervised research course instead of via part-time employment.
In Spring 2020, the RAs voted to change the name to “Legal Disruption Project”. No focus groups ran that semester due to the pandemic.Focus groups were shifted to LWS 225: Research Methods in Law and Society and run remotely for the first time in the fall semester.
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The LDP was launched as “Food for Thought” thanks to a Faculty-Student Research Collaboration Award. Four student RAs began working on the project. Initial focus group participants were recruited via advertisements offering free pizza in exchange for a discussion about student experiences within their communities.
Initial focus groups started with the question: “what is the most important problem you, your family, or your community face?”
*The number of participants and focus groups refers to those with existing transcript data; some focus groups from early semesters are missing data. Data on “countries of origin” was collected via a survey asking students whether they or their families moved to the US from another country, and if so, from where. Puerto Rico is counted separately from the United States. Seven students not included in these numbers gave an affirmative response without naming a specific country (e.g. “West Africa” or “Caribbean”). Those who answered “No” or left the question blank (73 in total) were coded as USA. Race and ethnicity was asked as an open-ended question, so some participants indicated both race and ethnicity while others did not. There were 29 participants with no data on this question.
Methodology
LDP is a participatory action research (PAR) project. PAR prioritizes collaboration and social change, and is rooted in the idea that power relations that produce inequality can be disrupted through the research process itself. Student Research Assistants are the heart of the Legal Disruption Project. They collaborate with faculty to generate questions about the most significant problems facing their own communities, and then they use those questions to run focus groups with their fellow students.
Since John Jay College is a majority-minority, Hispanic Serving Institution, the LDP positions people from some of the most marginalized communities in the US, including those with deep relationships to marginalized places across the globe, at the center of decision-making processes about how best to collect and use data regarding their own communities. It therefore contributes to broader conversations about decolonizing research and the relationship between human rights and processes of data collection.