Research
My research examines how law structures political power, shapes relations of inequality, and becomes a site of contestation among states, institutions, and social movements. I am particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold at the intersections of race, gender, and settler colonialism, with federal Indian law, women’s rights, and right-wing mobilization providing critical sites for analysis. Two interrelated lines of inquiry anchor my scholarship:
- The legal strategies of right-wing social movements, including countermobilization by grassroots activists and policy elites
- The evolution of federal Indian policy, particularly as adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court
My research uses a primarily qualitative, socio-historical approach, drawing on archival research, discourse analysis, interviews, and systematic analysis of legal texts and judicial decision-making. Across these projects, I examine how individual and institutional actors construct legal meaning, mobilize political claims, and shape public understandings of rights and inequality. This work contributes to debates in political sociology on law, state power, social movements, and citizenship. What follows are three core socio-historical puzzles that animate my research. For each, I draw on completed and ongoing projects that collectively form a long-term research agenda.
How Does U.S. Law and Policy Structure Settler Colonialism and Racialized Gender Violence?
My first line of inquiry developed through my book Injustice in Indian Country: Jurisdiction, American Law, and Sexual Violence Against Native Women (2016; revised 2022). The book situates violence against Native women within a broader colonial legal regime, showing how jurisdictional complexity has functioned as a tool of racialized state power. Drawing on qualitative historical methods and Indigenous-centered approaches, the project demonstrates how U.S. law curtailed tribal sovereignty and entrenched impunity for violence, reshaping both individual rights and institutional authority. Originally published in 2016, the book prompted invited talks at institutions including Stanford University Law School, Columbia University Medical School, and the University of Oregon. Due to its continued relevance, I released a revised paperback edition in 2022. A companion article on Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978) extends this work by analyzing the Supreme Court decision that stripped tribes of criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. The analysis shows how judicial reasoning institutionalized limits on tribal authority while reframing constitutional rights in ways that constrained sovereignty.
Despite the clear relationship between colonization, sexual violence, and the law, mainstream scholarship has too often neglected violence against Native women in Indian Country as part of a broader historical narrative of colonialism. My book and related work intervene by demonstrating how jurisdictional complexity operates as a form of state violence and by theorizing gendered violence as embedded within broader systems of racial domination. This foundation grounds my broader inquiry into the legal structures that sustain inequality and shape the contours of citizenship in the United States.
How Do Courts Produce Legal Meaning Within Systems of Racialized and Colonial Power?
Building on my analysis of judicial behavior in Indian law cases, one core project in my dissertation is “Breaking Rank: Decision-Making and Judicial Behavior in Indian Law Cases on the Roberts Court”, accepted for presentation at the Law & Society Association annual meeting and targeted for submission to Law & Society Review. Voting patterns in cases involving the rights of marginalized communities might lead one to expect that Supreme Court rulings in Indian law cases adjudicated under the Roberts Court (2005–present) would fall along ideological lines; however, that is not the case. Instead, virtually every such ruling reflects what I call ideological “rank breaking,” in which conservative and liberal voting blocs splinter in unexpected ways. While rank breaking is not unique to Indian law, my quantitative analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court Database shows that its frequency in these cases is statistically significant—a finding that underscores the need to rethink traditional metrics when considering judicial behavior.
To complete this project, I built a novel dataset of 35 Indian law cases heard by the Roberts Court, encompassing 67 written opinions and 45.75 hours of oral arguments, which I systematically coded for qualitative analysis. The findings indicate that, rather than political ideology, justices’ decisions are shaped by judicial philosophy, such as constitutional originalism, with rank breaking emerging from differences in how these philosophies are interpreted and applied. I contend that this pattern stems from the unique capacity of Indian law cases to expose variations in judicial philosophy, owing to tribal nations’ distinctive political relationship with the United States—one that differs from that of other minority populations. Beyond advancing scholarship on federal Indian law, this work refines our understanding of judicial behavior, with implications for predicting Supreme Court outcomes. It also offers a framework for scholars in law, political science, and critical race theory to examine how the political status of Indigenous nations shapes legal reasoning and doctrinal development. More broadly, the distinctiveness of Indian law offers a powerful lens for extending theoretical work on liberalism and conservatism, including scholarship on how these ideologies operate in multicultural democracies.
I extend this inquiry through “Taking the Children to Take the Land: Indian Child Welfare and the Enduring Epidemic of Family Separation”, published in Policing Not Protecting Families: The Child Welfare System as Poverty Governance (NYU Press, 2025). This chapter situates Indian child welfare within a longer trajectory of land dispossession and family separation, showing how federal and state systems have targeted Native families in ways that collapse Indigenous political identity into racial categories. By connecting the regulation of Native children and families to struggles over land, sovereignty, and political authority, the chapter demonstrates how child welfare law remains embedded within the broader structure of settler-colonial governance.
How Are Discourses of Race and Gender Mobilized by Right-Wing Movements to Shape Law and Policy?
Building from my book’s analysis of sovereignty politics, I examine how conservative movements use law and discourse to contest and restrict rights. My analysis of congressional debates over the Violence Against Women Act shows how policy elites framed potential beneficiaries—including immigrant women, LGBTQ communities, and Native women—as undeserving in order to justify withdrawing support for the Act. This project provides the foundation for my concept of speculative victimhood, a broader framework for understanding how right-wing movements elevate imagined or theoretically possible harms to politically dominant groups above the documented victimization of marginalized communities. By portraying rights-expanding reforms as threats, speculative victimhood allows conjectural future injuries to outweigh existing evidence of inequality and harm, recasting opposition to policies involving gender violence, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and political participation as protective rather than exclusionary.
A second dissertation paper titled “Gendered Discourse in the ERA of Change: The Equal Rights Amendment, Discursive Framing, and Anti-Feminist Activism” extends this framework to the Equal Rights Amendment, examining how the STOP-ERA campaign, led primarily by women, mobilized opposition to a constitutional amendment prohibiting sex-based discrimination. By qualitatively coding more than 160 publications, I show that activists relied on appeals to gender norms and patriarchal scripts, often co-opting feminist language, to frame legal equality as detrimental to women. This analysis highlights how right-wing grassroots actors, like their elite counterparts, strategically reframed rights in ways that proved persuasive even to those the amendment sought to benefit.
Extant literature on social movement organizations and legal mobilization has typically focused on grassroots activists advancing liberal causes. Less attention has been given to the ways policy elites engage in framing tasks in response to social movement actors and constituent pressure. My work addresses this gap by showing how both elites and grassroots activists function as movement participants who strategically frame law and rights to curtail protections and redefine the boundaries of citizenship.
Together, these projects develop a transferable framework for understanding how right-wing movements reshape rights discourse. More broadly, this research demonstrates how law functions not only as an institutional structure but also as an expressive domain that communicates symbolic boundaries of belonging, legitimacy, and protection. It advances scholarship on social movements, legal mobilization, and conservative politics by showing how histories of support for legislation can be reversed or redefined through strategic discursive work.
Future Directions in Interdisciplinary Scholarship
As a scholar, I am committed to research that interrogates structures of inequality and advances knowledge in areas that have historically been marginalized in political and legal discourse. Through work that engages intersectional questions of race, gender, and settler colonialism in the United States, I aim to make empirical, theoretical, and publicly relevant contributions. By situating the study of law within broader questions of inequality, representation, institutional legitimacy, and political authority, I seek to contribute to an intellectual community that values rigorous scholarship, methodological breadth, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public engagement.