Building Robust & Inclusive Democracy

Research/Areas of Interest

Crime, Law, Deviance; Sports; the Body; Research Methods

Education

  • PhD, Sociology, Northwestern University, United States, 2015
  • MA, Sociology, Northwestern University, United States, 2010
  • MA, Social Psychology, University of Chicago, United States, 2009
  • JD, Seattle University School of Law, United States, 2008
  • BA, English, Boston University, United States, 2003
  • BS, Journalism, Boston University, United States, 2003

Biography

Jill D. Weinberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, IL. She joined Tufts University after serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at DePaul University.

She is a scholar who examines the decriminalization through social process, focusing on the ways groups use rules, norms, and the language of consent and choice. Her first book, Consensual Violence: Sex, Sports, and the Politics of Injury (University of California Press 2016), examines how two groups that willingly engage in seemingly violent activities — mixed-martial arts and sexual sadomasochism -- enact elaborate law-like rules to organize themselves and to demonstrate their legitimacy to a broader public. Her second book project is a cross-country comparison of assisted death and the ways terminally ill people, their loved ones, and medical professionals navigate laws that proscribe or permit aid-in-dying.

Her second research stream emerges from the "Contested Constructions of Discrimination Project" funded by the American Bar Foundation. This project uses experimental research design and semi-structured interviews to compare how ordinary people and trial judges define employment discrimination.

She is widely published in peer-review journals such as Sociological Science, Sociological Methods & Research, and Law & Social Inquiry. Popular accounts of her work have appeared in the Advocate, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Truthout, and the Society Pages.

In her free time, she is an avid runner and enjoys hanging out with her pugs.