Carroll Seron joined the Department of Criminology, Law and Society in 2005. Her research examines the social processes of legitimating legal activities. In earlier work, Seron studied the organizational structure of the federal courts, focusing on the ways in which techniques of administration and rationalization of dispute resolution may compromise the core legal values of due process and a rule of law.
Seron has also conducted research on the legal profession. In a study of solo and small-firm lawyers, she examined how these practitioners balance and enact professional values in a world that allows legal advertising and other entrepreneurial techniques of business development. With colleague Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, and graduate students, Bonnie Oglinsky and Robert Suate, at the Graduate Center, CUNY, she studied how new policies to allow part-time and flexible work schedules affect the mobility patterns and careers opportunities of those who opt for this track.
Seron's recent work has taken a very different turn, but flows from a fundamental commitment to understand legitimation of legal activity. Currently, she is completing a study of how citizens and police officers form judgments about the boundary between appropriate police practices and brutality. Police officers are among the most ubiquitous symbols of law. Understanding whether and to what extent citizens and cops enjoy a consensus on what constitutes the boundary between fair and brutal policing goes to the core of the legitimacy of this institution.