Michele Statz, Principal Investigator (CV)

Michele Statz is an anthropologist of law. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth and affiliated faculty with the University of Minnesota Law School. She is also a 2021-22 Access to Justice Faculty Scholar at the American Bar Foundation.

Michele’s current research examines how socio-spatial dimensions of rurality influence legal advocacy, rights mobilization, and the work of tribal and state court judges in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. This project stretches the usual bounds of analysis by underscoring rural individuals’ own expertise and experiences of the “rural lawscape.” It likewise identifies necessary opportunities for these perspectives to inform and innovate policy, practice, and applied research methodologies. Statz’s research has been published in Harvard Law and Policy Review, Law & Society Review, American Journal of Public Health, Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law & Policy, The Lancet Regional Health - Americas, and Health and Place.

Michele's other work includes collaborative and interdisciplinary projects on reproductive justice, immigration policy, and global youth, and she also co-founded and co-curates Youth Circulations, an online platform for art, activism, and scholarship on mobility and the politics of representation.

Her new book, Lawyering an Uncertain Cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the U.S. explores constructions of age and vulnerability in legal advocacy on behalf of young Chinese migrants.

• "A humanistic, wonderfully written, engaging, and terribly important work of scholarship in a crucial area of research."
  —Robert Barsky, author of Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law: The Flight and the Plight of People Deemed "Illegal"