Students toured and met with a judge at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Attending the Law & Society Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco this summer was a powerful — and potentially career-defining — experience that Lauren Karg ’28 will never forget.
“I was able to make so many connections and meet some of my academic heroes. It was incredible,” she said. “It’s really made me reconsider what I think would make me happiest in a vital way that I’m really grateful for.”
An aspiring attorney who now is considering a change to academia, Karg went to the conference in May with 12 of her Kenyon peers — as well as a recent graduate who presented his research from last summer — as part of the John W. Adams Summer Scholar Program in Socio-Legal Studies.
Part of the College’s robust slate of summer research programs, the Adams Summer Scholar initiative was established in 2008 to allow students to work in close collaboration with faculty members on a socio-legal studies research project or internship.
Socio-legal studies explores the cross-cutting relationship between law, society and culture. This year’s scholars are studying topics that range from disparities in immigrant detention to trends in drug use and crime in Knox County to the Federalist Society’s influence on the judiciary.
A fully funded trip allows the group to explore the field more broadly.. In 2025, scholars traveled to New York City; this year, they headed west to San Francisco for four days.
While in the Bay Area, students met with a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the largest federal appellate court in the country. They also visited the University of San Francisco School of Law and learned about prison history and culture at Alcatraz.
The centerpiece of the trip, though, was the Law & Society Association conference, which drew more than 2,000 people from over 50 countries. It was the perfect place for students to form a “community of scholarly engagement,” according to Margaret Stevenson, associate professor of psychology, the program’s director who led the trip with Christopher Levesque, assistant professor of law and society and sociology.
“It was a great opportunity for students to identify the very scholars that they are researching, studying and citing in their own summer research and go up to them, meet them, and hear their talks in person,” Stevenson said.
For Karg, a psychology major from Pittsburgh with a law and society concentration, that included meeting a scholar she wrote about at Kenyon and attending a variety of sessions that she thought would be helpful for her summer research project. Working with Stevenson, she’s examining if there is an implicit dehumanizing association between Latinos and the word “aliens” in the context of immigration.
Karg also proudly supported her Kenyon mentors and peers who made presentations at the conference. These included Levesque and recent graduate Siqi “Sam” Yue ’26, who studied stand-your-ground laws and Asian defendants as part of the Adams program last year.
“(Yue) was presenting his senior thesis, essentially, at this conference, and he was doing it alongside some of the biggest names in the psych and law field,” Karg said.
Stevenson added: “Sam’s presentation is a great example of the quality work produced by the program and this year’s summer cohort got to see firsthand what they will have the potential to do with their summer research.”
