Charles Epp

Chuck Epp's research focuses on law, social change and administrative reform on civil rights and climate change. He has just completed a major study of environmental groups’ successful campaign to shift electricity generation from coal to wind and solar power. His book on the campaign, titled Challenging Power (currently under peer review) shows how environmental groups built a coalition of over a thousand organizations and coordinated broad popular pressure, litigation, and scientific testimony across all fifty states and numerous federal agencies and courts to block hundreds of proposed coal plants and shut down hundreds more. In addition to Challenging Power, he is the author of numerous journal articles and several award-winning books published by the University of Chicago Press: The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (1998); Making Rights Real: Activists, Bureaucrats, and the Creation of the Legalistic State (2009); and Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (2014, co-authored with Steven Maynard-Moody and Donald Haider-Markel). Epp’s research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. He has received major awards for teaching and mentoring, has served on the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association, and is co-editor of the University of Chicago Press Series in Law & Society.