Podcast: Professor Monica C. Bell Makes the Case for Law/Sociology
Professor of Law Monica C. Bell ’09 does not do law and sociology. Those are her two disciplines, of course — in addition to her appointment at Yale Law School, where she received tenure in 2022, she is also an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
Instead, as Bell told Dean Heather K. Gerken on the Inside Yale Law School podcast, she envisions a way of scholarly thinking that blends the two disciplines “because I think that's where we get meaningful policy and legal insights.” Call it law/sociology.
On the podcast, Bell discusses her scholarship, her background, and bringing her whole person to her work. She explains how she expresses legal theory in unconventional ways, including through poetry and through the artistic outlet that has gained her a social media following.
About Monica Bell
Bell uses sociological theory and methods to explore legal questions, mostly those focused on race and class inequality. Her work has focused on subjects including policing, violence, safety and security, welfare and public benefits, housing, and residential segregation. Her award-winning scholarship has been widely published. She has also written for popular outlets including Politico, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Inquest, and The Washington Post.
Prior to joining the Yale Law School faculty, Bell was a Climenko Fellow & Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a Liman Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia.
Why people feel a disconnect from the law (4:22)
Bell explains her concept of legal estrangement, which Gerken called one of the most important ideas by a Yale scholar in recent years. Bell has described legal estrangement as an intuition people have that the law and its creators and enforcers operate to exclude them from society. She also explains how the idea both builds upon and challenges one of the reigning theories in criminal law, procedural justice:
“How people see the police treat other people they care about, how they see people who look like them treated by the police in other scenarios, so for example on the news and of course, all of the viral videos that have circulated of police violence and negative police interactions, those are important for understanding this relationship.”
Related:
Professor Bell on Inequality, Sociology, and Legal Estrangement (Q&A)
Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement (Yale Law Journal)
Why people who distrust police still call them (7:36)
Bell’s research helps answer a question that has long puzzled scholars: why Black people who say they are distrustful of police continue to call the police in their own communities. Bell interviewed 50 Black mothers living in subsidized housing in Washington, D.C., about their experiences with legal authorities. In her paper, she lays out four situations in which these mothers would call the police. She explains:
“One part of the conversation would be about how much they hated the police or something like this. But then actually asking people about their interactions with the police, asking them about times they would call, times they had called … So I focused on times when they actually did call the police and then dug more deeply.”
Related:
Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism (Law & Society Review)
Calling the Police, without Trusting the Police (JSTOR Daily)
How poetry makes research sing (20:47)
Bell previews her upcoming book of empirical poetry, a form she developed that presents qualitative social science — interviews — as poetry. In these vignettes, she tells people’s stories in their own words and allows for theoretical insights into the law. Bell debuted the form in her 2019 paper, “Friendship, Safety, and Dreams,” in which she talked to young people in Baltimore about their experiences with the criminal legal system.
“It draws from traditional types of qualitative methodology in terms of coding interviews for themes … But it also tries to reimagine the interviews themselves in a way that draws upon the words of people who are being interviewed to convey the specific critiques they're making of law and also their emotional responses to law.”
Related:
Selections about and of empirical poetry from The Notebook:
“What is Meant to Love My Son”
From a small town to the halls of academia (23:21)
Bell talks about growing up in South Carolina, where she was the first person in her family to go to college — something her church almost did not allow her to do. Bell said that even though she’s always been suited for academic life, becoming a professor hadn’t occurred to her until one thing happened in law school.
“I've always been the kind of nerdy person. I've always been intellectually curious. And I think, frankly, academia is a perfectly natural place for me to wind up. It's just not something that I had cut a clear path toward before I got here actually.”
Related:
Monica Bell ’03 explores the power of poetry to bring change (profile by Furman University)
The subversiveness of eye shadow (29:49)
Bell discusses her popular Instagram account, where she combines makeup tutorials with book recommendations. She uses the platform to introduce beauty enthusiasts to authors writing about social justice.
"And so I think to kind of spread that work a little bit through this other medium is important to me, but also I think just being a whole person is important. I mean, I find makeup to be a healthy way of engaging in a sort of artistic expression. It's actually a lot of the way I think about my scholarship as well.”
Related:
@monicabellmakeup (Instagram)
