Legal Consciousness in Mixed-Status Families
Starting in 2025, a number of individual student projects dealt with the question of how immigrant communities in New York City were navigating the increased presence of ICE in the city, and how that relates to the way people understand and interact with the law more broadly. For reasons of safety, interview subjects were not disclosed and written work was only submitted in hard copy. However, the insights coming from this work provide important ways to understand the relationship between law and society, building on scholarship around relational legal consciousness (Abrego 2019; Flores, Escudero, and Burciaga 2019).
Abrego, Leisy J. "Relational legal consciousness of US citizenship: Privilege, responsibility, guilt, and love in Latino mixed-status families." Law & Society Review 53, no. 3 (2019): 641-670.
Flores, Andrea, Kevin Escudero, and Edelina Burciaga. "Legal–spatial consciousness: A legal geography framework for examining migrant illegality." Law & Policy 41, no. 1 (2019): 12-33.
The Revolving Door: Mental Health, Incarceration, and the Limits of Criminal Justice Reform
by Camelia Robinson (May 2026)
This project examines how young people with untreated mental illness engage with the criminal justice system and experience cycles of recidivism. Using in-depth interviews, the project finds that people with untreated mental illness develop interpretations of law not only before formal legal contact but also through the structural conditions that shape their environments.
Connected to this project is an innovative board game that walks people through some of the way these structural conditions shape people’s environments.