2025-26 Bellow Scholars

2025-26 Bellow Scholars

Anna VanCleave, University of Connecticut School of Law 

Bail, Detention, and Pretrial Procedures in Connecticut: An Analysis of Current Practices and Recommendations for the Elimination of Cash Bail   

For at least a decade, Connecticut stakeholders have been engaged in serious discussions about eliminating cash bail. Despite extensive research, fact-gathering, and dissemination of information, only incremental changes have been made to date and cash bail continues to hold between 3,000 and 4,000 people in Connecticut jails at any given time. This project aims to gather data on bail/detention practices and impacts that will inform discussions about the current state of affairs and the necessary components of a bail reform package. This research project is one piece of a multi-pronged effort that is currently in progress to inform discussions about what a Connecticut bail reform package will look like. This project aims to answer a broad question: How well do current procedures function for assessing which individuals should be detained? Specifically, the project will be driven by the following questions: 1) Are courts adhering to bail/detention procedures set forth for initial bail hearings, automatic bail review hearings, and hearings on bail modification motions? 2) How often are defense lawyers filing motions for bail modification? Have the filings increased, decreased, or stayed the same since the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision, State v. Pan? 3) How well do current bail/detention procedures anticipate who will be deemed a risk to public safety at the conclusion of the case?  

Jyoti Nanda, Southwestern Law School  

The Pathways of Girls/Gender Expansive Youth into and within the Youth Carceral System

This project aims to unpack the myriads of pathways of girls in the youth carceral system by coding and analyzing data from approximately 150-200 unredacted closed case files of detained pregnant girls who were held in custody by Los Angeles County Probation between 2018-2023. The goals of the project are trifold: 1) to identify the mechanisms and pathways by which girls enter the carceral system, 2) to map how and if pregnancy or parenting status impacts which girls are most likely to stay within the system and which are most likely to receive services, and 3) to identify which systems and system actors intervene and which are complicit in pregnant girls’ detainment. The project entails reviewing and coding random case file samples to identify the girls’ demographic characteristics and background, their pathways into the carceral system, and the services received. The project will contextualize the case data about all probation youth in the Los Angeles County probation system with metadata. This project is part of a larger project in collaboration with the African American Policy Forum to give voice to the lived experiences of girls in the system as part of a campaign to end the incarceration of all girls. The project is interdisciplinary and my co-collaborator is Maritza E. Salazar, Ph.D., Research Fellow, Mexican American Opportunity Foundation.   

Laura McNally, Case Western Reserve School of Law  

Examining the Impact of “Tangled Titles” on Housing Stability, Wealth Preservation, and Aging in Place in Urban Cities  

This research project aims to examine the impact of “tangled titles” on housing stability, wealth preservation, and the ability of senior citizens to age in place in urban cities, focusing on historically redlined neighborhoods. Tangled titles happen when the legal ownership of a property is unclear or disputed. The primary way this occurs is heirs’ property, or property passed down without a clear title. Tangled titles disproportionately affect Black communities, leading to barriers in accessing financial resources, housing stability, and generational wealth accumulation. Furthermore, senior citizens living in homes with tangled titles face additional challenges, including difficulties securing home modifications, accessing social services, and displacement. Using a mixed-methods approach—including GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping, legal case analysis, and qualitative interviews—this study will provide empirical evidence to inform policy recommendations and legal interventions that will untangle titles and support aging residents. The study is intended to provide additional essential information to help direct service work and expand our understanding of the issue and its impact on our elderly and aging population. Despite the issue of tangled titles being well-known as problematic, there is a dearth of data available to support the need for legal services in the Cleveland community. 

Rachel T. Goldberg, Cornell Law School  

Analyzing Women’s Capital Trials for Gender-Biased Language  

This project seeks to show how courtroom actors express gender bias in the criminal trials of women facing the death penalty. It uses innovative and interdisciplinary qualitative and computational methods to explore and identify gender-biased language deployed in women’s capital trials. Our team—which includes co-principal investigators Sandra Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, and Allison Koenecke, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University—has found that legal actors frequently invoke biased tropes in women’s criminal trials, including those of hypersexualization, deficient mothering, and emotional manipulation. In the next phase of the project, we will expand our dataset to analyze the capital trials of all women currently on death row in the United States and compare them to a subset of trials for men sentenced to death. The objective is that this research will have far-reaching impacts on the legal system’s understanding of how gendered discourses are deployed against women in the legal system—especially against those facing the harshest sentences.