Through her project “Professionalizing Discrimination: Legal Actors and the Struggle Against Racialized Policing in Multicultural Societies”, Peled examines the role of lawyers in perpetuating racialized police violence in multicultural societies. While much of the work on racialized police killing and police violence focuses on the police themselves, the role of lawyers in enabling these incidents is often ignored. To unpack the ways lawyers and judges support, resist and confront racism in their practices, Peled interviewed prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges in Israel. Her groundbreaking work argues that the solution to the problem of racialized policing will have to include transformation within the legal profession
Her defense committee unanimously commended the work, saying, “the real genius of Peled’s project is that it merges theories of identity (self and others) with professionalized role competence. This combination demonstrates not just that lawyers are – like all people – influenced by race and racism in their decision making but also that legal norms and rules also play a role in the failure to address racialized police violence.”