Sarah Staszak received a Ph.D. in political science from Brandeis University in 2010 and is currently on leave from The City College of New York—CUNY, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department.  Her research interests are at the intersection of American politics, public policy, and public law, and she teaches courses on American political institutions, law and policy, and the American state.  Her book, No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment (Oxford University Press, 2015) examines the politics and implications of the efforts to constrain access to courts and the legal system as they have unfolded in the years since the expansions of the civil rights era.  As an RWJ scholar at Harvard she has begun two projects: one that focuses on the politics, consequences, and legalities of bureaucratic rulemaking through informal guidance documents, and another which examines the enforcement mechanisms for a provision of the American With Disabilities Act that provides that individuals with mental illness have a right to live in the community rather than in state institutions. Her other ongoing research projects focus on the development of legal services for the poor and the growing use of arbitration in the U.S.