Michele Statz, PhD

Biography of Michele Statz

Dr. Statz is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School.  She is affiliated faculty with the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center and is also an Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation.  Michele is trained as an anthropologist of law and is a leading researcher in rural and indigenous access to justice.  Her work has appeared in Law  Society Review, Harvard law  Policy Review, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others.  It is generously funded by the National Science Foundation. Michele is the co-founder of the Law and rurality Collaborative Research Network, and she is a member of the Federal-level Rural Justice Task Force and the National Advisory Council for Front line Justice.

Michel's other ongoing work includes interdisciplinary and mixed-media projects on global youth and mobility; reproductive justice; working-class identity; rural housing precocity; and immigration lawyering.  Her first book, Lawyering an Uncertain cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the U.S. (Vanderbilt U Press), was published in 2018. Michele Statz holds a PhD. in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Comparative Law and Society Studies from the University of Washington.