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Scholars

Abigail Stepnitz

University of San Diego

Based in

United States
North America

Abigail Stepnitz is Assistant Professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University. She holds a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) from the University of California, Berkeley and an MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and teaching are rooted in law and society with a focus on migration, climate change and constitutional law. Her work on asylum and legal narratives of credibility has recently appeared in the Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality and in Social & Legal Studies. She is currently working on a book about how we make law during and for the climate crisis and writing a paper on disappearing rights at the border for a volume on Law & Magic. More information about her work is on her SSRN page.
She teaches courses in the LPS curriculum including Constitutional Law and Interpretation, Migration and Membership, Law & Society in a Changing Climate and Law & Popular Culture.

Country(ies) of Specialty

United States

Focus areas of expertise

Climate policy and politics Climate law and litigation Climate Justice

How to Connect

Publications

Articles

2023. Stepnitz, AbigailBelieving Asylum-Seeking Women: Doing Gender in Legal Narratives of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence. Social & Legal Studies, Forthcoming

Stepnitz, Abigail. ‘A lie more disastrous than the truth: Asylum and the identification of trafficked women in the UK.‘ Anti-Trafficking Review 1 (2012).

2018. Stepnitz, Abigail. Re(art)iculating Refugees: Spectacle and the Cultural Contestation of Law. 16 Berkeley Journal of Sociology

Stepnitz, Abigail. 2023. “Storied Pasts: Evolving Norms in US Affirmative Asylum Narratives 1989-2018” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol. 41.
2020. Stepnitz, Abigail. ‘Between Convention and Resistance: Counter-Narrative Strategies in Political Asylum Claims‘ in The Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives, Klarissa Leug and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, eds. Routledge.