About

Matthew Clair is Assistant Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Law at Stanford University. His scholarship broadly examines how cultural meanings and interactions reflect, reproduce, and challenge various dimensions of social inequality and state violence. His research to date has focused on courts and the legal profession. The former body of work leverages the case of courts to sharpen theoretical understandings of the state, institutional inequality, and envisioning among marginalized groups, whereas the latter body of work leverages the case of the legal profession to explore how workplaces and occupational cultures are shaped by the social crises of the twenty-first century. Matt is the author of the award-winning book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press). His scholarship has been published in several academic and popular outlets and has received awards from multiple sociological and criminological associations. He has also been supported by several grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In 2022, Matt received the American Society of Criminology's Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award and Stanford University's highest teaching award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently working on three research projects: a longitudinal interview study of prospective law school students; a multi-method study and archive of court systems in the Bay Area called The Court Listening Project; and the evaluation of a "systems navigator" program in the Santa Clara County Office of the Public Defender. He received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Criminology
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Systems Navigators in Public Defense: Recommendations for Assisting Clients Pretrial

  2025-01-29

  preprintSenior author

  People charged with crime often struggle to navigate the court process and secure the resources needed to rebuild their lives, especially if they are mandated to abide by pretrial conditions. In the summer of 2024, researchers at Stanford University collaborated with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office to pilot an innovative “systems navigator” program that sought to support felony clients navigating the pretrial process. This report describes the systems navigator program and offers lessons learned. We detail five practical recommendations that could improve collaboration between lawyers and their clients and facilitate access to social services.

  PublisherDOI

• The study of culture, law, and crisis

  2025-08-07

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper reviews cultural sociological approaches to the study of law and how they may be applied to future research on law-related social crises. As the world faces myriad social crises, such as rising authoritarianism and police violence, the study of culture and the law has become an even more urgent intellectual and practical endeavor. Over the last decade, five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. While past research has provided generative insight, future research would benefit from more precise considerations of rules and norms in this unsettled moment. Moreover, future research could leverage the five cultural concepts to sharpen understandings of inequality and social control in understudied legal organizations, along understudied axes of social stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies into the legal system.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spatial Burdens of State Institutions: The Case of Criminal Courthouses

  Social Service Review · 2025-04-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article theorizes how space shapes access to state institutions and with what consequences. Drawing on 125 interviews and more than 400 hours of ethnographic observations concerning two criminal courthouses within the same county, we identify four spatial features that differentially shape access alongside institutional rules and norms: functional distance, neighborhood social life, exterior built forms, and interior built forms. When they constrain access, these features constitute spatial burdens, which contribute to distinct institutional and collateral costs concentrated among marginalized groups. We theorize how these costs likely reproduce systemic patterns of inequality by extending people’s burdensome interactions with the institution they seek to access and compelling them to interact with other state institutions that further the state’s power over their lives. The theory of spatial burdens has implications for the study of poverty governance and institutional inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Moral reconciling at career launch: politics, race, and occupational choice

  Socio-Economic Review · 2024-09-18 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Recent research suggests that college-educated young adults, especially those who are politically liberal and/or racially marginalized, exhibit moral reservations about their intended occupations. How do they justify entering occupations that conflict with their morals, and with what consequences? This article examines the case of 74 mostly liberal prospective law school students from a range of racial backgrounds followed over 2 years. In interviews at career launch, respondents criticized the legal profession for its perceived perpetuation of inequality and violence. Despite their moral reservations, they articulated three occupational justification narratives for attending law school: lifting up (exceptional lawyering); leveraging out (legal education for nonlawyer aspirations); and leaning in (conscientious class mobility/maintenance). These narratives differentiate between morally ‘good’ and ‘bad’ occupational domains—a cultural-cognitive process we term moral reconciling. We theorize how moral reconciling at career launch charts young adults down different early career trajectories, with implications for occupational sorting and change.

  PublisherDOI

• Moral reconciling at career launch: The case of liberal prospective law school students

  2023-07-05 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How do people justify entering an occupation that conflicts with their morals, and what consequences do their justifications have for occupational inequality and change? Scholars have considered how morals shape identities and careers among workers, but we know less about how morals shape—and complicate—the choice to enter an occupation. We examine the case of liberal young adults considering entrance into the legal profession. Drawing on interviews with a racially diverse sample of 74 prospective law school students, we find that they exhibit moral conflict at the prospect of entering the profession. They articulate three occupational justification narratives for attending law school despite their criticisms: lifting up (exceptional lawyering); leveraging out (legal education for non-lawyer aspirations); and leaning in (conscientious class mobility/maintenance). These justifications differentiate between morally “good” and “bad” jobs, roles, tasks, and ways of being in the occupation and situate ideal careers within “good” occupational domains—a cultural-cognitive process we term moral reconciling. To build theory on moral reconciling at career launch as a novel mechanism of occupational inequality and the reproduction of occupational morals, we analyze data on prospective law school students’ early career trajectories two years after their initial interview. We discuss implications for research on career launch, occupational socialization, and occupational morals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “The roughest form of social work:” How court officials justify bail decisions

  Criminology · 2023-09-17 · 15 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Growing research has analyzed quantitative patterns of bail decisions and outcomes, but we know far less about how court officials justify their bail decisions. To enhance understanding of how bail decisions—and their resulting pretrial outcomes—are generated, we interviewed 104 judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a northeastern state. Court officials in our study reported three primary justifications at bail: ensuring defendants return to court, preventing crime, and lessening harm. The first two justifications have been suggested in the literature, but the latter is novel and encompasses two secondary justifications: lessening criminal legal system harm and lessening societal harm. We show how these justifications and the decisions they enable blend risk management with rehabilitation and emerge from court officials’ shared assumption of defendants’ social marginality but varied beliefs about what to do about such marginality pretrial. Each justification allows for distinct, but at times overlapping, bail decisions. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of court official decision‐making, research on racial and socioeconomic inequality, and bail reform policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of policing among criminal defendants in San Jose, California

  CrimRxiv · 2022-08-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black Sociology in the Era of Black Lives Matter

  Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race · 2022-01-01 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 1973, on the heels of the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist and civil rights activist Joyce A. Ladner edited a collection titled The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture. Bringing together an impressive set of Black writers and academics, the essays sought to make “an early statement on the development of Black sociology […and] to examine some of the historical forces which have acted upon Black sociologists, and to explicate some of the issues which are central to this new discipline” (Ladner [1973] 1998, p. xxvii). For Ladner, as she wrote in her introduction, Black sociology must be distinct from mainstream (White) sociology in its expressly normative commitment to using social science to “eliminat[e] racism and systematic class oppression from the society [and…to] promot[e] the interests of the Black masses” (Ladner [1973] 1998, p. xxvii). Whereas mainstream sociological theories had long been used to justify the subordination of Black people, Black sociology was an emergent discipline that sought Black liberation.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of policing among criminal defendants in San Jose, California

  2022-04-26 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This report summarizes perceptions of policing among a racially and socio-economically diverse sample of 37 people who faced criminal charges in the Hall of Justice, a courthouse in San Jose, California, between August 2021 and March 2022. A majority of criminal defendants we interviewed reported negative perceptions of personal police treatment, but a considerable minority reported positive perceptions. Among those who reported negative perceptions, two criticisms were common: (1) individual police officers’ violence, abuse, and fabrication of evidence; and (2) systemic policing practices that are overly intrusive and estrange certain disfavored groups in the Bay Area, such as the unhoused. Among those who reported positive perceptions, some believe that, despite their personal experiences of positive treatment, police do not treat everyone fairly and policing quality varies by context and the race of the policed person. Alongside these perceptions, a handful of defendants in the sample offered visions for changing policing. Two notable visions were: (1) reallocating resources from police departments toward other city services or under-resourced groups; and (2) reforming police departments in ways that reduce discrimination and abuse. While we discuss variation along demographic characteristics in our sample, we foreground how the range of experiences and visions of policing in San Jose have implications for policymakers and future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial Disparities in Arrests in Santa Clara County, California, 1980-2019

  2022-10-08

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  This report examines racial/ethnic disparities in arrests in Santa Clara County, California, from 1980 to 2019. Over the past forty years, felony and misdemeanor arrest rates have declined for all racial groups, but racial disparities have persisted and, in some cases, increased. Black residents, though a small percentage of the population, are disproportionately susceptible to being arrested. In the 2010s, the Black arrest rate was 5.4 times the White arrest rate—the highest Black-White ratio in arrest rates observed over the four decades. Nevertheless, as overall arrest rates declined over this period, the absolute difference between Black and White arrest rates substantially narrowed. Hispanic residents are also disproportionately arrested, but to a lesser degree than Black residents. Racial/ethnic disparities are most pronounced with respect to felony arrests; the Black-White ratio in felony arrest rates peaked at 7.2 in the 1980s and declined to 6.6 in the 2010s. Racial/ethnic disparities also exist, to a lesser degree, with respect to misdemeanor arrests. We find small racial differences in arrest dispositions (or, what law enforcement does with a person following arrest). However, it is noteworthy that, across all four decades, Black and Hispanic felony arrests are slightly more likely than White felony arrests to result in release due to “insufficient grounds to file a complaint.” This pattern could suggest that law enforcement officers are more likely to arrest Black and Hispanic residents for reasons that law enforcement entities later determine do not rise to the level sufficient for filing a complaint with the District Attorney’s Office.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sophia Hunt

  Stanford University

  19 shared

• Alix S. Winter

  CDC Foundation

  6 shared

• Caitlin Daniel

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Michèle Lamont

  Harvard University Press

  4 shared

• Lifang Chiang

  University of California Office of the President

  4 shared

• Micayla Bozeman

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Claudia Nmai

  2 shared

• Jeffrey S. Denis

  Trent University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Harvard University

Awards & honors

• Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022)
• Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award (2022)
• Awards from the American Sociological Association
• Awards from the American Society of Criminology
• Awards from the Law & Society Association