Two UH Mānoa associate professors from the College of Social Sciences (CSS), Katharina Heyer and Ashley Rubin, have been appointed to three-year terms as co-editors of the Law & Society Review (LSR) journal. Published quarterly by the Law and Society Association, LSR is the premier journal in the field of international law and society. The journal explores the relationship between society and the legal process through a variety of pieces, ranging from articles, theoretical developments, empirical studies, comments on methods of inquiry, and items of general interest to the research community.
Heyer and Rubin will be joined in their co-editorship by Professor Shauhin Talesh of the University of California, Irvine. The trio will serve through January 2026.
“I’m excited to get to work closely with and learn from my co-editors, two amazing law and society scholars,” said Rubin, associate professor of sociology. “We’re honored and humbled to be taking on a position that so many amazing scholars have held before us.”
Heyer’s and Rubin’s appointments mark the second time in recent history that the LSR editorship has been led by CSS faculty, and cements the University’s reputation as one of the clear centers of law and society teaching and research. In 2011, Professors Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Political Science) and David Johnson (Sociology) began their co-editorship of the journal.
“I hope that bringing the Law & Society Review back to Hawai’i will generate new excitement and opportunities for sociolegal studies at our University,” said Heyer, associate professor of political science.
Heyer’s research explores the ways that notions of disability equality and disability justice are mobilized and contested by local, national and global networks. Her book, Rights Enabled: the Disability Revolution (University of Michigan Press, 2015), follows the development of disability rights discourse in the U.S., Japan, Germany and the United Nations, and examines the implementation of disability education and employment human rights guarantees. She has also published on the politics of disability rights within contemporary discourses on prenatal testing, selective abortion, and death and dying policies.
Rubin’s research examines the dynamics of penal change throughout U.S. history. In particular, she uses organizational theory, law and society, punishment and society, and prison sociology to understand prisoner behavior, administrative behavior in penal organizations, and penal trends more broadly. She is author of The Deviant Prison (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Rocking Qualitative Social Science (Stanford University Press, 2021), and is currently writing a book on the history of American prisons.
The Law and Society Association is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts.
