The Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce our newest annual cohort of LPE Student Fellows. The Student Fellowship supports law and doctoral students to carry out research in the field of law and political economy. This year, we are fortunate to host a cohort of seven extraordinary Student Fellows whose research projects examine the role of law in the construction of economic and social inequality, power relations, and the political economy of market societies.

Maddie Chang is a third-year JD student at Harvard Law School working on the distributional impact of policymaking related to artificial intelligence. Before law school, she worked on policy to address algorithmic discrimination and on the governance of facial recognition technology.

Vanessa Daza Castillo is an SJD candidate at Harvard Law School, where she researches the intersections of gender, political ecology, and law. Her dissertation examines the changes in household size, composition, and productive/reproductive functions brought about by the establishment of a mining economy in La Guajira, Colombia.

Christina Ge is a second-year JD student at Harvard Law School and writes about how state constitutions can contribute to more just and inclusive labor protections. She has worked in legal economic research, provided social welfare direct services, and studied redistributive political philosophy at Brown.

Andrew Keefe is a JD/PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. His research relies on mixed and comparative-historical methods to examine the political economy of criminal law and procedure.

Divya Nimmagadda is a third-year JD student at Harvard Law School. She is interested in expanding avenues of collective participation through voting and labor rights work, and the intersection of those fields with artificial intelligence and other technology.

Gilbert Placeres is a fourth-year joint degree JD/MPP student at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Informed by his previous experience as an organizer in Miami, he studies the possibility of federal protection of local policymaking from state preemption.

Samara Trilling is a third-year JD student at Harvard Law School interested in strengthening anti-monopoly law, building worker power, and regulating tech. Samara spent seven years as a software engineer prior to law school building anti-eviction tools at Justfix, city master-planning software at Sidewalk Labs, and digital divide and democratic news reporting tools at Google.