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Karen M. Tani is a scholar of U.S. legal history, with broad interests in poverty law and policy, administrative agencies, rights language, federalism, and the modern American state. She is the author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972, published in April 2016 by the Studies in Legal History series of Cambridge University Press. The book aims to shed new light on the nature of modern American governance by examining legal contests over welfare benefits and administration in the years between the New Deal and the modern welfare rights movement. She is also the author of many law review articles including, her most recent, “An Administrative Right to Be Free from Sexual Violence?: Title IX Enforcement in Historical and Institutional Perspective,” which appeared in the Duke Law Journal. She teaches torts, legal and constitutional history, and social welfare law at Berkeley School of Law.