Janice Gallagher is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research addresses how an active civil society affects the provision of justice and the rule of law. Departing from institutional explanations of judicial change, her work emphasizes the societal embeddedness of judicial actors. She examines the micro-processes of how organized citizens matter in determining judicial outcomes, bringing activists and advocates into the picture as agenda setters and incentivizers for judicial accountability and human rights compliance.
Prior to joining Rutgers, Gallagher was a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Mexico and Colombia, and previously worked as a human rights accompanier in Colombia.
Gallagher holds a PhD in Government from Cornell University and an MA in teaching from Brown University.