Her research currently focuses on governance and policy-making on the environmental issues associated with agriculture.  She is working on several projects on the adoption of innovative technologies and best management practices to address nutrient loss in Midwestern waters, and the role of voluntary policies in promoting such adoption. In addition, with a team of scientists and engineers across the country, she is a co-PI on the INFEWS-ER, an NSF-funded virtual resource center supporting transdisciplinary graduate education on “wicked problems” at the intersection of Food-Energy-Water Systems.

These projects are an extension of Marshall’s longstanding research interests on understanding the role of law in promoting social change. In her work on legal consciousness, she examined the way that social change creates conflict in everyday life and how individuals use law, politics and experience to resolve these conflicts.  She has studied these issues in her book Confronting Sexual Harassment: The Law and Politics of Everyday Life and in her research on the politics of family life in the lgbt community.  She also studied cause lawyers and the political and cultural life of law in social movement strategies and in the context of the environmental justice movement and the lgbt movement.  Her work has appeared in Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, and several edited volumes.