Professor Monica Bell ’09 Receives AALS Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award

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Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Sociology Monica C. Bell ’09 received the 2022 Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award on Saturday, Jan 8, 2022. The award, given by the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) honors a junior law school faculty member “who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching or scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice.”

Headshot of Monica Bell
Professor Monica C. Bell ’09

In 2021, Bell also received two awards for her scholarship. The Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) awarded her the Distinguished Article Award for her article, “Located Institutions: Neighborhood Frames, Residential Preferences, and the Case of Policing,” published in the American Journal of Sociology.

For the same article, the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the ASA awarded Bell the Jane Addams Article Award. Bell’s scholarship has also appeared in the Yale Law Journal, NYU Law ReviewHarvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and Law & Society Review. Most recently, she published “Next-Generation Policing Research: Three Propositions” in the fall 2021 edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives

Professor Bell’s areas of research include law and inequality, policing and the criminal legal system, welfare and public benefits law, housing law and residential segregation, and race and the law. In 2019, she received the Yale Law Women Faculty Excellence Award, and she is a 2021-22 Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation. She has been an Arthur Liman Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and was honored as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and a George Mitchell Scholar.