Law and Conflict (LAC)

Founder and Director
Liana Eustacia Reyes

Liana Eustacia Reyes, JD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and the Founder and Director of LAC.

Dr. Reyes brings her expertise in the scientific study of law and conflict to understand the determinants and consequences of conflict resolution. To this end, Dr. Reyes engages in theoretically driven data collection efforts and multi-method analyses. Her main research project theorizes the implications of group-level legal preferences for conflict resolution and provides an in-depth and systematic analysis of them: how these preferences vary across groups and how their degree of congruence facilitates/obstructs conflict resolution. To date, this research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, Rice University's Social Sciences Research Institute, the University of Pennsylvania's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Purdue University, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.  Dr. Reyes's co-authored work examines law, conflict, and governance, with particular emphasis on negotiations, arbitration, constitution-making, justice mechanisms, property rights, and rebel governance, and has been published in journals such as the International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, ​and ​Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 

Graduate Research Fellow
Mitushi Mukherjee, PhD Candidate in Political Science

Undergraduate Student Researchers