Dr. Catherine Albiston

Biography

Catherine Albiston joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2003 and holds affiliate appointments in Sociology and Gender Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. At the law school, she teaches both the J.D. and Ph.D. programs with courses that include Employment Discrimination, Sociology of Law, Social Movements and Law, Research Design, and the Advanced Interdisciplinary Writing Workshop in Law. Albiston’s research addresses the relationship between law and social change through a variety of empirical projects. Her current study involves more than 200 public interest law organizations and investigates the variation in strategy, structure, and mission of these organizations in relation to access to justice. Her work examines institutional factors that influence law students’ commitment to public interest careers and biases workers face based on race, gender, and caretaker status, as well as gender and racial disparities in STEM faculty hiring and the institutional factors that may mitigate these disparities. Albiston's multi-method empirical studies utilize original data including quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, experimental methods, and archival research in legal media archives. She has received prestigious research grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, and the Law School Admissions Council. Her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as the Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and the American Journal of Sociology. In 2010, Cambridge University Press published her book, 'Institutional Inequality and Mobilization: The Family Medical Leave Act and Rights to Leave.' She has received multiple accolades including the Law & Society Association Article Prize and the Law & Society Association Dissertation Prize. Additionally, she won the UC campus-wide Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award in 2016 and served on the Board of Trustees for the Law & Society Association.

Research Interests

Experience