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Kaaryn Gustafson

Kaaryn Gustafson, has extensive knowledge of the nation's welfare system and a passion for getting beyond rhetoric to study how welfare functions in practice. Her dissertation, The Morality and Rationality of Welfare: Welfare Recipients' Negotiation of the Welfare System, for which she recently earned a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California at Berkeley, is a sophisticated demonstration, based on countless personal interviews with welfare recipients, of why the rules placed on the books by welfare lawmakers may often bear little resemblance to the system experienced by those we are trying to help. Although her Ph.D. is new, Professor Gustafson comes to us with considerable experience as an instructor in courses at Berkeley, as a litigator at the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Winthrop and as a policy analyst and advocate at the Welfare Rights Education and Advocacy Project of the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland. She has published writings in the American Journal of Legal History and the Berkeley Women's Law Journal and co-authored (with Linda Burnham) a report to the United Nations on U.S. government policy toward poor women and children. A member of the American Sociological Association and active leader in the Law & Society Association, Professor Gustafson holds her J.D. (1997) from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley (where she was both solicitations and articles editor of the Berkeley Women's Law Journal) and her A.B. magna cum laude in Sociology (1990) from Harvard University.

Recent Courses

• Critical Identity Theory (Spring 2009)
• Criminal Law (Fall 2008)
• Criminal Procedure (Fall 2008)
• Criminal Procedure (Spring 2008)
• Law and the Welfare State (Spring 2008)
• Criminal Procedure (Spring 2007)