Meghan Ballard is an associate policy researcher at RAND. Her work focuses on access to justice, criminal justice policy, and structural inequities in the legal system. As a sociolegal researcher, she uses qualitative and mixed methods—including qualitative interviews and focus groups, regulatory and policy analysis, historical analysis, Delphi panels, and analysis of underutilized public data sources—to study how laws and regulations are interpreted, implemented, and experienced on the ground.
Her recent projects have studied public defender workload, AI applications in criminal justice, COVID-19 impacts on military justice, criminal history record sharing for federal personnel vetting, and language access in justice settings, with particular attention to civil rights protections, institutional capacity, and emerging technologies.
Before joining RAND, Ballard worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she supported white-collar antitrust prosecutions and provided civil rights technical assistance to courts, law enforcement agencies, and correctional institutions.
Ballard received a Ph.D. in criminology, law, and society from the University of California, Irvine.
Bachelor of Arts in political science, University of California-Berkeley; Master of Science in criminology, American University; Doctor of Philosophy in criminology, law and society, University of California-Irvine
