Richard Arum, a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, has been awarded a grant in the amount of $232,101 from the National Science Foundation for a research project, "School Rights: Law and the Dynamics of Everyday School Life." The grant will go to extending on-going fieldwork being conducted since Fall 2006 in 24 high schools in three states.

Arum and his collaborators, Calvin Morrill (UC Irvine), Lauren Edelman (UC Berkeley), and Karolyn Tyson (UNC Chapel Hill), are conducting the first large-scare survey and ethnographic analysis of the dynamics of law and everyday school life. The research focuses on three arenas of legal regulation that are central to schools: discipline, civil rights (including sexual harassment), and free speech.

Arum's research study, "A National Probability Survey of Teachers and Administrators: Tracking Variation in Educators' Perceptions and Experience of Law," also has received funding in the amount of $92,400 from the Kauffman Foundation. An extension of the research project mentioned above, the study will survey a national sample of public school teachers and administrators and will identify variation in legal consciousness and its relationship to education.