Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We happily welcome back Leti Volpp as a member of the OSI 2026 faculty!
Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. She has served as a Visiting Professor affiliated with the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and as past Faculty for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award, and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award. She has served as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Leti will convene a workshop with Marco Wan and Maurice Stierl on questions of Mobility, Borders, and Rights.

Her most recent publications include “Weep the People,” UC Law Review (forthcoming), “Crossing Borders, Criminality, and Indigenous Sovereignty,” in Critical Times (forthcoming), “Citizenship” in R. Spoo and S. Stern, eds., Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming), “Refugees Welcome?” in Irina Brittner, Sabine N. Meyer, and Peter Schneck, eds., We the People: the United States and the Question of Rights (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020) and “Pushing Out and Bleeding In: On the Mobility of Borders,” in Peter Niesen, ed., The Shifting Border: Ayelet Shachar in Dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2020). She is also the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019), and of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (John Hopkins University Press, 2006). Her earlier work includes the much cited “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review (2002), and “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review (2001).

At Berkeley Volpp is also an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies. She is a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. At Berkeley she anchors initiatives on Law and Humanities with Bryan Wagner and Marianne Constable. She is looking forward to returning to OSI this summer.