Kaaryn Gustafson

Kaaryn Gustafson
Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law
Hosmer Hall 108
860-570-5322
Contact Kaaryn Gustafson

Biography

Kaaryn Gustafson, who joined the law faculty in 2004, has extensive knowledge of the nation's welfare system, and how rules and regulations actually function in practice. Her research focuses on law and inequality and draws heavily upon both empirical research and critical theory. Her book Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty (NYU Press, 2011) was co-winner of the 2012 Herbert Jacob Book Prize awarded by the Law & Society Association for outstanding new book. Cheating Welfare challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, about welfare recipients, and about crime control policies in the United States. In addition to her academic writing, Gustafson has co-authored (with Linda Burnham) a report to the United Nations on U.S. government policy toward poor women and children and a number of Op-Eds.

Professor Gustafson earned her, A.B. magna cum laude in Sociology from Harvard College, her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law (where she was an editor for both the Berkeley Women's Law Journal and the African-American Law & Policy Report), and her Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley. Prior to teaching at the University of Connecticut, Gustafson worked as a litigator at a San Francisco law firm and as a policy analyst and advocate at the Welfare Rights Education and Advocacy Project of the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland.

Professor Gustafson has served on the Board of Trustees for the Law & Society Association, on the Editorial Advisory Board for Law & Society Review, on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and on the Board of Directors of Greater Hartford Legal Aid. She is a member of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) and the American Sociological Association.

In 2009, the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups selected Gustafson as the recipient of the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award, which honors a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice.

Selected Publications

Degradation Ceremonies and the Criminalization of Low-Income Women, 3 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2013).
Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty (NYU Press, 2011).
Breaking Vows: Marriage Promotion, The New Patriarchy, and the Retreat from Egalitarianism, 5 Stanford J. C.R. & C.L. 269 (2009).
The Criminalization of Poverty, 99 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 643 (2009).
Disability, Fluidity, and Measuring without Baselines, 75 Miss. L.J. 1007 (2006).

Representative Courses

Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure
Law & the Welfare State
Critical Identity Theory Seminar

Email: kaaryn dot gustafson at law dot uconn dot edu