SUSAN S. SILBEY
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Room 16-233
617-253-6952

ssilbey@mit.edu

Professor Silbey received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and post-graduate training in ethnography in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She has written about the social organization of law in diverse institutional and informal settings including attorney general's offices, courts, schools, private homes, businesses and scientific laboratories; she has also studied alternative forms of dispute resolution including negotiation and mediation. She edited Studies in Law, Politics and Society (1990-1997) and the Law & Society Review (1998-2000). In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (with Patricia Ewick) describing the ways in which Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law, and in 2003, In Litigation: Do the 'Haves' Still Come Out Ahead? (edited with Herbert Kritzer). Her current research looks at the roles and conceptions of law in scientific laboratories, comparing the place of law in expert communities and popular culture. She is supervising an experiment in ethnographic fieldwork, as well as research on the development of new safety regimes in research labs and the effects of laboratory organization on gender hierarchies in science. In addition, she is conducting a six year longitudinal study of engineering education, following a cohort of students through four different engineering schools. Professor Silbey is Past President of the Law & Society Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and in November 2006 received a Doctor Honoris Causa from Ecole Normale Superiere Cachan in Paris.

Susan Silbey's Homepage: http://web.mit.edu/sociology/ssilbey