In his award winning paper, "For Every Regulation You Pass, the Market is Gonna React: Risk, Property Rights, and the Limits of Anti-Discrimination Law," Marco Brydolf-Horwitz draws on ethnographic data to tackle a theoretically rich and substantively important question: will a recent legal reform intended to ensure that housing applicants' with criminal records have an opportunity to secure rental housing achieve its intended goal? He first develops a theory of property-rights-in-action, then applies this framework to this case study of landlords' reactions to the recent reform to deepen our understanding of how legal property rights work in concert with risk
management strategies to enable landlords to circumvent the spirit of the law. The paper makes a number of important contributions
to our understanding of the re-entry process as well as to socio-legal analyses of the limits of anti-discrimination law.
Brydolf-Horwitz was also recognized this Spring with the 2019 Award for Excellence as a Teaching Assistant.