About

Michelle Wilde Anderson is the Larry Kramer Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and holds a joint appointment with Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. Her academic work focuses on poverty and inequality, local government law, housing, and environmental justice. She writes and teaches about the governance of low-income urban and rural communities, combining legal analysis with humanistic reporting to understand and improve city and county governance. Her notable contributions include her book, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, published in June 2022, which explores the dismantling and rebuilding of local government in high-poverty communities through narrative portraits of urban and rural poverty. Anderson’s research addresses issues such as the collapse of basic services, gun violence, unlivable wages, and housing foreclosures in communities like Stockton, California; Detroit, Michigan; and others. She has been recognized with the American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal in 2019. Anderson’s work also examines the impact of racial segregation and implicit bias on public investment, service delivery, and housing quality. She has taught at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School, and prior to Stanford, she was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley Law. She is actively involved in public service, serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Housing Law Project and as a board member at the East Bay Community Law Center.

Research topics

• Mathematical analysis
• Mathematical physics
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Quantum mechanics

Selected publications

• Gravitational Forces

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Relativity of Time and Space

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Well-posed geometric boundary data in General Relativity, III: conformal-volume boundary data

  ArXiv.org · 2025-07-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In this third work in a series, we prove the local-in-time well-posedness of the IBVP for the vacuum Einstein equations in general relativity with twisted DIrichlet boundary conditions on a finite timelike boundary. The boundary conditions consist of specification of the pointwise conformal class of the boundary metric, together with a scalar density involving a combination of the volume form of the bulk metric restricted to the boundary together with the volume form of the boundary metric itself.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantum–Mechanical Fields

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Well-posed geometric boundary data in General Relativity, II: Dirichlet boundary data

  ArXiv.org · 2025-05-11

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In this second work in a series, we prove the local-in-time well-posedness of the IBVP for the vacuum Einstein equations with Dirichlet boundary data on a finite timelike boundary, provided the Brown-York stress tensor of the boundary is a Lorentz metric of the same sign as the induced Lorentz metric on the boundary. This is a convexity-type assumption which is an exact analog of a similar result in the Riemannian setting. This assumption on the (extrinsic) Brown-York tensor cannot be dropped in general.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Bartnik quasi-local mass conjectures

  Beijing Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Bartnik quasi-local mass conjectures

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-08-02

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper is a tribute to Robert Bartnik and his work and conjectures on quasi-local mass. We present a framework in which to clearly analyse Bartnik's static vacuum extension conjecture. While we prove that this conjecture is not true in general, it remains a fundamental open problem to understand the realm of its validity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Nirenberg problem of prescribed Gauss curvature on $S^2$

  Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici · 2021-06-23 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We introduce a new perspective on the classical Nirenberg problem of understanding the possible Gauss curvatures of metrics on S^{2} conformal to the round metric. A key tool is to employ the smooth Cheeger–Gromov compactness theorem to obtain general and essentially sharp a priori estimates for Gauss curvatures K contained in naturally defined stable regions. We prove that in such stable regions, the map u \to K_{g} , g = e^{2u}g_{+1} is a proper Fredholm map with well-defined degree on each component. This leads to a number of new existence and non-existence results. We also present a new proof and generalization of the Moser theorem on Gauss curvatures of even conformal metrics on S^{2} . In contrast to previous work, the work here does not use any of the Sobolev-type inequalities of Trudinger–Moser–Aubin–Onofri.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On the conformal method for the Einstein constraint equations

  Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this work, we use the global analysis and degree-theoretic methods introduced by Smale to study the existence and multiplicity of solutions of the vacuum Einstein constraint equations given by the conformal method of Lichnerowicz-Choquet-Bruhat-York. In particular this approach gives a new proof of the existence result of Maxwell and Holst-Nagy-Tsogtgerel. We also relate the method to the limit equation of Dahl-Gicquaud-Humbert and the non-existence result of Nguyen.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dust Sampling in Simulated Cage-Free Egg Production Environment

  Iowa State University Digital Repository (Iowa State University) · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access

  • New developments in cage-free egg production has brought dust management practices into question. The problem at hand is how to make repeatable dust samples to determine best management practices.

  PublisherOA PDF

Recent grants

• Geometry and Analysis of Einstein Metrics

  NSF · $337k · 2016–2019

• Geometric and Analytic Aspects of Einstein Metrics

  NSF · $319k · 2012–2016

• Geometric Structures on Low Dimensional Manifolds

  NSF · $562k · 2006–2010

Frequent coauthors

• E. Conte

  Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien

  39 shared

• C. Ferro

  West Visayas State University

  37 shared

• D. Blöch

  Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien

  37 shared

• J. Andreä

  Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien

  34 shared

• F. Drouhin

  Université de Strasbourg

  33 shared

• A. Meyer

  Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

  32 shared

• S. Perriès

  Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lyon

  32 shared

• Y. Tschudi

  Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lyon

  32 shared

Education

• B.A., Public Policy

  Harvard University

  1998

• M.A., Public Policy

  Harvard University

  2000

• Other, Law

  Stanford Law School

  2003

• Ph.D., Environmental Earth System Science

  Stanford University

  2010

Awards & honors

• Early Career Scholars Medal by the American Law Institute (2…