Emily Ryo joined Stanford Law School as a fellow at the Stanford Program in Law & Society in 2011.  She works at the intersection of law, public policy, and sociology.  Her primary research and teaching interests are in immigration law, civil rights and anti-discrimination law, criminal law, and socio-legal studies.  Her current scholarship focuses on questions relating to the role of social norms, morality, and cognition in shaping lay and judicial attitudes, and decision-making and behavior in legal contexts.  She employs a variety of legal and empirical methods in her work, including doctrinal and statutory analyses, and collection and analyses of archival, interview, experimental, and survey data.

Prior to joining Stanford Law School, she received a Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University.  Her dissertation, Becoming Illegal, develops a new decision-making model of unauthorized labor migration, which considers not only the economic motivations of prospective unauthorized migrants, but also their beliefs, attitudes, and social norms regarding U.S. immigration law and legal authorities.  Her current projects include investigations of anti-immigration laws, effects of the convergence of immigration and criminal laws, and moral-character determinations in immigration and criminal law contexts.

Ryo served as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court.  She also worked as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, and Hamilton.  She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), and B.A. (history) from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (summa cum laude).