Pitt Law Professor Wang Awarded Social Science Research Initiative Grant

University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor Lu-in Wang was awarded a Social Science Research Initiative grant from the Chancellor’s Office for Research to support her team’s project, “Precarious Work and the Experiences of Frontline Service Workers.” She is the principal investigator on the project, which includes faculty from several other schools and units at the University of Pittsburgh.
Wang’s scholarship examines ordinary and extraordinary forms of discrimination and the connections between them. Her recent work explores the legal implications of economic and social stereotypes in the service industry, particularly with respect to discrimination in employment and against customers. An earlier book, Discrimination by Default: How Racism Becomes Routine (New York University Press 2006), draws on social psychology to detail three commonplace but generally unrecognized ways in which unconscious assumptions lead to discrimination in a wide range of everyday settings and how these dynamics interact to produce an invisible, self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating prophecy of racial disparity. Wang also has written on more extreme forms of discrimination. In addition to being the author of Hate Crimes Law (West 1994), the first legal treatise on that subject, she has published several articles that apply insights from historical, sociological, and social psychological literature to illuminate the legal issues related to bias-motivated violence. Wang's articles have appeared in journals including the Southern California Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Boston University Law Review, the Lewis & Clark Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law.
Wang has received the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award and has twice received the Student Bar Association's Excellence in Teaching Award. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation.
Wang has also served as a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico School of Law. Before she began teaching, Wang practiced with firms in Chicago, Illinois, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She also served as a staff attorney for The Center for Social Gerontology, a national support center on law and aging, and as a law clerk for the late Justice Ralph J. Cappy of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.