Eve Darian-Smith, UC Irvine professor and chair of global and international studies, has been elected secretary of the Law and Society Association. She’ll serve a two-year term that begins in October 2021.  

“This year’s voting results represent a wide variety of law & society scholars stretching across the globe and consisting of rich and diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds, training and experience,” said current LSA president Penelope Andrews. “Our incoming officers will not only contribute to the sustainability and viability of the LSA, but also demonstrate the importance of advancing the entire field of sociolegal studies through their own personal scholarship and achievements.”

Darian-Smith, a scholar of global governance and international human rights, has been committed to LSA since joining its community in 1991. She’s served on the Board of Trustees three times and Executive Committee twice. Darian-Smith has demonstrated her passion for furthering diversity and encouraging the participation of minority and international scholars. As a member of LSA’s second Half Century Committee, she helped develop support for an African regional meeting.

Over the past three decades, Darian-Smith has consistently served on a host of LSA committees. Recently, she assisted in the submission of a National Science Foundation grant to enable scholars from low and middle-income countries to participate in the LSA 2022 international meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Darian-Smith’s interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on engaging human rights, legal pluralism, (post) colonialism, sociolegal theory and ethnographic methods. She won LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize (2000) and has published widely, including in the Routledge Handbook of Law and Society.

Darian-Smith received her bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She spent three years working as a corporate lawyer with Corrs Australian Solicitors before returning back to school to earn her master’s in anthropology at Harvard and her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She was a professor in the departments of anthropology, law and society, and global studies - and twice served as department chair - at UC Santa Barbara from 1995 until fall 2017 when she joined the UCI faculty. During her 22-year UCSB tenure, she took two years of leave to chair the legal studies department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since her arrival at UCI, she’s successfully formalized the program in international studies – which administers one of the top 20 most popular majors on campus - into a full-fledged department, complete with a new Ph.D. program in global studies. Learn more about her work here and read the full LSA announcement here.