Matthew Clair

Matthew Clair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and, by courtesy, the Law School. His scholarship broadly examines how cultural meanings and interactions reflect, reproduce, and challenge various dimensions of social inequality and state violence. His research to date has focused on courts and the legal profession. The former body of work leverages the case of courts to sharpen theoretical understandings of the state, institutional inequality, and envisioning among marginalized groups, whereas the latter body of work leverages the case of the legal profession to explore how workplaces and occupational cultures are shaped by the social crises of the twenty-first century. Prior to joining Stanford, Matt was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Quattrone Center. He holds an AB in Government from Harvard College and an AM and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.