Pedro Cantisano is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the department's Law and Society major.  He is a legal historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin America, focusing on sociolegal histories of cities, social movements, and public health. He has published in English and Portuguese on slavery and freedom suits, and on the role of police powers and rights consciousness in Brazil’s 1904 anti-vaccination revolt.

His current book project Confronting the Common Good is about law, science, and popular protest in Brazil. It argues that contested public health and urban transformations in early-twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro changed how Brazilians imagined the balance between individual rights and the common good. Based on previously untouched court records and on a sociolegal reading of law books and newspapers, the book unpacks a web of legal and scientific ideas and practices, revealing how legal professionals, scientists, and urban dwellers envisioned rights, the common good, and the relationship between them.

Cantisano's work has been supported by the American Society for Legal History Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory postdoctoral fellowship, and the Fundação Getulio Vargas – FGV Law School Fellows in Rio program. Before joining the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he taught at FGV Law School, Kenyon College and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.