Catherine Albiston

Catherine Albiston is the Jackson H. Rolston Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. She also holds affiliate appointments in Sociology and in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Albiston’s research addresses the relationship between law and social change through a variety of empirical projects. Her current study of more than 200 public interest law organizations investigates how variation in strategy, structure and mission among public interest law organizations relate to access to justice. Albiston’s multi-method empirical studies are based on original data from quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, experimental methods, and archival research in legal and media archives. She has received several prestigious research grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as grants from the American Bar Foundation and the Law School Admissions Council. Albiston’s publications appear in peer review journals such as Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science, as well as several law reviews. In 2010, Cambridge University Press published her book, Institutional Inequality and the Mobilization of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Rights on Leave. Her work won multiple prizes, including the Law & Society Association Article Prize, the Law & Society Association Dissertation Prize, and Honorable Mention for the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association.