Professor Laura E. Gómez recently became president of the Law and Society Association Saturday, May 30. Gómez is the first minority scholar and one of the youngest ever elected to head this international association of scholars. The Law and Society Association is a global organization of university scholars who study law in its cultural context.
Photo: Laura E. Gómez
The association publishes the “Law & Society Review,” the leading journal in the field, sponsors annual conferences and educational workshops, and fosters development of academic programs in law and society. Past presidents of the organization include scholars from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University.
Gómez was born in 1964 in Roswell, N.M., where her parents, Antonio Gómez, a UNM retiree, and Eloyda Gonzales Gómez, an oncology nurse at Presbyterian Hospital; were also born. Her brother is Miguel Gómez, a former Albuquerque city councilor and graduate of Notre Dame University. Gómez lives in Albuquerque’s North Valley with her 12-year-old son Alejandro. She is the descendant, via her paternal grandmother, of Cayetano Carrillo, one of the original settlers of Tularosa. Gómez was raised in Albuquerque, where her parents moved in 1966 when her father began attending UNM on the G.I. Bill.
In 1986, Gómez graduated with honors from Harvard College, where she was a Harry S Truman Scholar, president of the Mexican American student organization and a masthead editor of the Harvard Crimson. Following graduation from college, Gómez worked as a legislative aide to Senator Jeff Bingaman during his freshman term in the U.S. Senate.
She went on to study at Stanford, where she obtained her law degree in 1992 and her Ph.D. in sociology in 1994. She was a law clerk to Federal Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before being hired by the University of California, Los Angeles as a law professor. She taught at UCLA for 12 years before coming to UNM.
Since 2006, she has taught at UNM, where she is holds a joint appointment in both the law school and the College of Arts & Sciences. Gómez has published numerous articles and two books,” Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race,” published in 2007, and “Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure,” published in 1997.
Media Contact: Benson Hendrix, (505) 277-1816; e-mail: bhendrix@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at May 29, 2009 04:42 PM