My sociolegal research broadly focuses on criminal law, education, and civil rights. My work has resulted in funding from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and Law & Society Dissertation Grant, several first author publications, a dozen conference paper presentations, and awards from the American Sociological Association and American Society of Criminology.

Legal Decision-Making

In my current book project, I use 51 interviews with prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement officers in California to explore why progressive prosecutors in U.S. sex crime cases adopt similar stances to tough-on-crime prosecutors. After the 1960s Warren Court expanded rights for defendants in U.S. criminal cases, countervailing campaigns to change the criminal legal system proliferated — progressive activists fighting for mercy and attention to inequalities, and Victims’ Rights Advocates and tough-on-crime conservatives fighting for harsher punishments. However, sex crime cases remain shaped by what legal scholar Aya Gruber terms “sex exceptionalism” — a view of sex offenders as being uniquely beyond reform.

My research reveals that (1) while U.S. sex crime cases are demographically whiter than non-sex crime cases, race- and gender-based biases persist, with Asian American and Pacific Islander women uniquely affected, (2) prosecutors reframe sex crime prosecutions as inherently just through positioning themselves as victims’ advocates alleviating gender inequality within a progressive framework, and (3) prosecutors use sociolegal jargon to justify punitive decisions in sex crime cases, especially targeting accused sex offenders from marginalized racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Ultimately, my research challenges the idea that “inequality” is an effective frame for progressive prosecution movements and contradicts existing assumptions in sociological literature that sex crime prosecutions are less susceptible to race-, gender-, and class-based bias.

Additionally, my research published in Sociology Compass revealed that contrary to prior studies, Black people experience higher arrest odds for reported contact sex crimes in the U.S. Further, the effect of Blackness on arrest odds is exacerbated by sex — it is higher for those labeled “female” or “other,” and lower for those labeled “male.” I argue this reflects how race constructs non-male bodies as masculine and how cultural understandings of sexual violence as masculine affect arrest patterns.

My work on race, gender, and sex crime case processing has been funded by the UNational Science Foundation Law & Society Dissertation Grant, the UCI Law Initiative to End Family Violence, and the American Society of Criminology. Additionally, my work received American Society of Criminology Division on Feminist Criminology Graduate Paper Award, the Miki Vohryzek-Bolden Student Paper Award, an Honorable Mention from the Society for Study of Social Problems Law & Society Student Paper Award, and was a Finalist for American Society of Criminology Division on Queer Criminology Student Paper Award.

Criminal Legal System Data Politics

This line of research, conducted in conjunction with my colleague Christine Head, examines how the accessibility, accuracy, and consistency of criminal legal system data affects emerging predictive policing technologies. We analyze how cross-state differences in criminal legal system data complicate national-level data sets that courts and scholars rely upon like the National Incident-Based Reporting System. We find that particularly when it comes to race and ethnicity, cross-state differences in how criminal legal system data is collected, stored, and disseminated obfuscate biases in the criminal legal system. Additionally, we examine how state-level bureaucrats make decisions about criminal legal system data dissemination, and how those decisions affect predictive policing AI models. 

Our research has been published in The Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI ’25), and presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems in Japan, the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Meeting. 

Title IX Processes

In my project published in Feminist Criminology, I conducted a survey of students at U.S. college campuses who had experienced school Title IX processes. I found that victims of sexual violence experienced secondary victimization similar to what victims of sexual violence experience in the criminal legal system, and that this was exacerbated by students feeling like they must have been treated better than other students (a phenomenon I term comparative secondary victimization). For my publication in The International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, I analyzed 80 school sexual violence policies across Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. to analyze how these policies discussed identity. This analysis revealed that school policies generally failed to account for the ways that the intersection of race, sexuality, and other identity categories shape students’ experiences with sexual violence. 

My research on Title IX was presented at the 63rd annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and won the 2022 American Sociological Association Student Forum Paper Award.