Executive Director American Bar Foundation | Chicago, Illinois We are pleased to announce the appointment of Laura Beth Nielsen, JD, PhD, as the Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation (ABF), effective September 2026. She is the ABF’s 11th Executive Director and the first woman to lead the organization.Dr. Nielsen, a leading sociologist of law, has been a Research Professor at the ABF for more than twenty-five years and holds a joint appointment at Northwestern University, where she is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair and a Professor of Sociology. She previously served as Director of Northwestern’s Center for Legal Studies. Dr. Nielsen is the former president of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and has been honored with the LSA’s Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award and awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Nielsen’s research examines how legal institutions shape—and are shaped by—inequality across race, gender, and class. Much of her work focuses specifically on legal consciousness and the ways individuals and communities come to understand and respond to law. She earned a PhD and JD from the University of California, Berkeley. Vijay Saraswat and Gale Merseth led this search with Tatiana Oberkoetter and Elizabeth Arvanitis.
