Putting Empirical Research into Action: Bernadette Atuahene’s New Legal Realism

Season 2 of our podcast highlights the work of a new generation of NLR scholars.  This second episode presents an interview with Professor Bernadette Atuahene, who has written about New Legal Realism movement in an article in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.  In this podcast, she explains how NLR fits with her pathbreaking work on property rights in South Africa and in Detroit.  She is featured in the upcoming Research Handbook of Modern Legal Realism (2021) as a “Llewellyn and Mentschikoff” figure of today’s realism because of her work combining theory, empirical research, and legal reform.  Indeed, she went further in proving the law-and-society research on legal mobilization right, recognizing that legal reform alone would not work, but must go hand-in-hand with ground-level partnerships to help lower-income homeowners illegally deprived of their houses. She exemplifies the NLR ideal in using ground-level-up social science research to make a real impact on people’s lives through law.