Catherine L. Crooke

/in /by

Catherine L. Crooke

PhD Candidate

Email: ccrooke@g.ucla.edu


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Biography

Catherine Crooke (she/they) is a lawyer and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. She uses qualitative methods to study law, migration, work, organizations, and professions. Her dissertation draws on over four years of participant observation and nearly 100 interviews with Los Angeles-based legal service providers to examine the U.S. immigration system as a site of both legal promise and institutional erosion. Foregrounding the everyday experiences of immigration lawyers, she shows how institutional instability reshapes professional practice and transforms the meaning of legality itself. More broadly, her project offers a framework for understanding how professionals sustain moral commitments within institutions marked by constraint.

Catherine’s scholarship appears in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Qualitative Research, and has received support from numerous funding agencies including the Ford Foundation, the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, and the Center for Institutional Courage. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.

Degrees

  • M.A., Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2021
  • J.D., Yale Law School, 2019
  • M.Sc., Refugee & Forced Migration Studies, University of Oxford, 2014
  • B.A., Comparative Literature & Society, Columbia University, 2012

Fields of Study

Sociology of Law; Law & Society; Organizations, Work & Professions; International Migration; Refugee & Asylum Law; Ethnography; Qualitative Methods

Research

Catherine’s doctoral research, comprising a multiyear ethnographic study of immigration lawyering in Los Angeles, advances an empirically grounded and theoretically generative account of how progressive legal advocates pursue justice within systems operating to constrain it. By studying asylum lawyers in Los Angeles, a global hub of immigration procedure, she reveals from a new angle the intricacies of an arcane legal system that governs the lives of millions of people. Because lawyers occupy a unique position between migrants and the state, their work affords an intimate, ground-level view into the operation of migration control. Studying attorneys’ experiences thus enriches existing theories of migration control while also revealing how legal systems reshape the professionals charged with navigating them.

More narrowly, Catherine’s dissertation foregrounds the politicization, bureaucratization, and hollowing out of legal institutions on which people rely for humanitarian protection. By centering the experiences of legal practitioners navigating this landscape on behalf of immigrants, her project theorizes how increasingly restrictive migration policies reverberate inward—unsettling legal norms, transforming professional practice, and destabilizing legal institutions and their perceived legitimacy. While much research on immigration lawyering focuses on attorneys’ impact on case outcomes and participation in migration governance, her project accounts not only for how lawyers act upon migration processes but also for how migration processes act upon lawyers. By theorizing how advocates adapt and improvise within structurally unjust systems, Catherine’s dissertation advances a broader framework for understanding how professionals sustain commitments to justice and legality amid institutional erosion. Together, these contributions illuminate both the fragility and the endurance of law as a site of moral and political action.

Publications

Crooke, Catherine L. 2026. “Participant Observation in the 21st Century: How the Digital Dimension Matters for All Ethnographers.” Qualitative Research 26(2): 457–477.  

Crooke, Catherine L. 2024. “Frustration and Fidelity: How Public Interest Lawyers Navigate Procedure in the Direct Representation of Asylum Seekers.” Law & Society Review 58(2): 270–293.

Crooke, Catherine L. 2024. “U.S. Asylum Lawyering and Temporal Violence.” Law & Social Inquiry 49(3): 1510–1537.

Awards & Grants

  • Center for Engaged Scholarship Dissertation Fellowship, 2026–2027
  • UCLA Sociology Dissertation Year Award, 2026–2027
  • Silton Mentoring Award, 2025
  • American Sociological Association (ASA) Minority Fellowship Program, 2024–2025
  • Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, 2021–2024
  • UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship, 2021–2022
  • UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship Program Award, 2021–2022, 2020–2021
  • UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program Award, 2021, 2020
  • UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration Research Stipend, 2020
  • Alternate & Honorable Mention, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, 2020
  • Yale MacMillan Center Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses Summer Fellowship, 2018
  • Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship, 2011

Conference Presentations

Law & Society Association Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA). “Small Sanctuaries: Contextual Intimacy and the Destabilization of Professional Boundaries in Asylum Advocacy.” (Panel presentation, Care, Coercion, and the State: Ethnographies of Legal Intermediaries Governing Vulnerable Populations, May 28, 2026.)

Law & Society Association Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL). “Ambivalence in Advocacy: How Lawyers Selectively Embrace the Law’s Legitimacy.” (Panel presentation, Anti-Establishment Mobilization in the USA, May 23, 2025.)

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (Montreal, Canada). “Participant Observation in the 21st Century: How the Digital Dimension Matters for All Ethnographers.” (Panel presentation, Developments in Field-Based Methods, August 10, 2024.)

Global Meeting on Law & Society (Virtual). “Frustration and Fidelity: How Progressive Lawyers Navigate Procedural Formalism in the Direct Representation of Asylum Seekers.” (Panel presentation, Immigration Courts and the Administration of Justice, July 16, 2022.)

New Directions in Law and Society Virtual Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop, hosted by the Center for Justice, Law and Societies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Virtual). “New Trials in Asylum Lawyering.” (Workshop presentation, October 9, 2021.)

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (Virtual). “The Temporal Tensions of Asylum Lawyering.” (Student panel presentation, August 7, 2021.)

Advisors

  • Cecilia Menjívar (Chair)
  • Stefan Timmermans
  • Roger Waldinger
  • Emily Ryo (Duke University School of Law)