The median LSAT score for the J.D. Class of 2025, highest in the school’s history.
The median GPA for the J.D. Class of 2025, highest in the school’s history.
Students in the J.D. Class of 2025 who are the first in their family to earn a college degree.
2021 graduates employed in bar passage required or JD advantage full-time long-term jobs at 10 months.
legal employers who visit UCLA Law annually for interviews, receptions, and networking events.
Number of UCLA Law faculty members recognized as among the most cited in their discipline.
Ranking of UCLA Law among all law faculty for median scholarly impact in SiskLeiter analysis.
Ranking of UCLA Law in scholarly impact of law faculty under the age of 60 in 2021.
billion impressions across media.
THIS FALL, THERE IS A PALPABLE ENERGY COURSING THROUGH THE HALLS OF UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW. IT’S MORE THAN OUR RETURN TO IN-PERSON LEARNING AND WORK—IT’S THE DYNAMISM OF POSSIBILITY, HOPE AND DEDICATION TO BUILDING A BETTER TOMORROW.
I see it in the newest members of our community. Our 1L class is both our most diverse and our best-credentialed, in terms of undergraduate performance and LSAT scores, in history. We’ve welcomed exceptional lawyers, scholars and professionals to our LL.M., S.J.D., and new Master of Legal Studies (M.L.S.) programs. And we’ve been joined by several new faculty members and fellows who bring expertise to our school in several of the most pressing issues of our time—the future of democracy, structural inequality, climate change, cyber activism, and the rights of Indigenous peoples.
UCLA Law is outstanding in so many ways. One is how we harness this intellectual energy, both inside our classrooms and well beyond. Our dozens of impactful programs, centers, and institutes, as well as the cutting-edge clinics, simulations, practicums, and externships that make up our trailblazing experiential education program, continue to grow in number, influence and prestige. Members of our community engage with the public on the key issues of the day and improve the lives of our neighbors far and wide.
But don’t just take my word for it. In this issue of the UCLA Law magazine, you can read about how our year-old Center for Immigration Law and Policy has generated innovative research, challenged antiimmigrant laws in the courts and unearthed evidence of anti-Asian racism behind laws that remain on the books. In the meantime, CILP has invited the very people who are impacted by our immigration laws to UCLA Law for conversations on what’s most important to us: how, as lawyers and lawyers-to-be, we can make a difference.
This ethos of utilizing our learned skills to create positive change extends across our law school. The new Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy has already become an authority on questions related to reproductive rights through its reports and policy efforts. Its faculty members have also developed pro bono opportunities for UCLA Law students, alumni, and the broader legal community to increase access to reproductive rights and sex education. And our recently founded Safeguarding Democracy Project is tackling the most topical and fraught matters involving voting and preserving vital norms.
At UCLA Law, our faculty scholars hardly go it alone, relying on our students as their best partners in answering the calls to address today’s greatest challenges. As just one example, when U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked for a united effort to confront the housing and eviction crisis last year, our students stepped
up. Working with faculty leaders, our clinics and our community partners, students provided more than 1,000 hours of pro bono legal assistance to people who are unhoused or housing insecure.
Of course, none of this work could be done without the inspiring engagement and gifts of time, energy, money, networking, hiring, and mentoring of our amazing alumni and friends. Year in and year out, you prove yourselves to be as incredible inside our halls as you are through your daily successes in law firms, courtrooms, businesses, academic institutions and more. I love hearing from you, reading your stories, and seeing how UCLA Law remains an ongoing part of your lives. Thank you!
This is a year of transition at UCLA Law. As we continue our return to a full slate of in-person classes and on-campus gatherings, I am honored to be serving as the law school’s interim dean, following the departure of Jennifer Mnookin, who served us in this role for seven years. I am proud to say that the most essential things—our commitment to achieving ever-higher levels of excellence, the terrific opportunities that we provide to our students, and the wonderful engagement of our alumni and friends—never change. In fact, at UCLA Law, they only ever grow stronger.
Russell Korobkin Interim Dean and Richard C. Maxwell Distinguished Professor of Law
Incoming students are the most diverse and credentialed in the school’s history.
Devon Carbado’s groundbreaking new books investigate police violence against Black people and critical race theory.
The 46th Annual UCLA Entertainment Symposium reached its largest-ever global audience.
Now a year old, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy has generated first-of-its kind research, challenged anti-immigrant and racist laws in the courts and unearthed evidence of anti-Asian racism behind laws that are still on the books today. They’ve done this, and more, not only through innovative legal reasoning and research, but also by bringing the very people impacted by our immigration laws into their classrooms and conversations.
From nontraditional law student to powerhouse public interest attorney —this is the story of alumna Dorothy Wolpert ’76
FROM AGUA CALIENTE BAND OF CAHUILLA INDIANS LAUNCHES RICHARD M. MILANOVICH FELLOWSHIP IN LAW
Former UCLA School of Law Dean Jennifer L. Mnookin has been selected to serve as the 30th leader of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The University of Wisconsin’s regents announced her appointment as chancellor on May 16. Her term began on August 4.
Mnookin served as UCLA Law’s dean, its ninth, from August 2015 to June 2022. Her tenure was marked by a significant increase in the opportunities available to the law school’s students and the continued excellence of its program of legal education. Today, UCLA Law brims with more talent, engagement and promise than ever before in its history.
Russell Korobkin was named interim dean and assumed his duties on June 13. A national search for UCLA Law’s next dean will be conducted within the next year.
field of evidence and a cofounder of the innovative PULSE at UCLA Law (Program on Understanding Law, Science and Evidence).
“Jennifer’s deanship has been extraordinary,” says Ann Carlson, the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law and a founding faculty member of UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, who currently serves as acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “One of the hallmarks of her leadership is just how good she is at so many parts of the job. She’s a great manager, a great
“Dean Mnookin has elevated the school in so many ways... As dean, she has always focused on access and excellence. Her leadership, innovation, and dedication to her faculty, students, and staff were everywhere apparent. While I am sad to see her go, I know she will be an exceptional leader in Madison.”
GENE BLOCK, UCLA CHANCELLOR“It has been both an honor and a pleasure to serve as dean of this law school I love so much,” says Mnookin, who first joined the UCLA Law faculty in 2005 and was the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Professor of Law. “I am certainly proud of the achievements of the past seven years, but it has, in every respect, been a team effort.”
In an announcement to the UCLA community, former Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Michael Levine applauded Mnookin as a widely admired leader both within the law school and, through many cross-campus collaborations, across the university.
“It is a well-deserved testament to Jennifer’s leadership abilities and record of success,” Levine wrote, “that she has been chosen to helm the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin system.”
“Dean Mnookin has elevated the school in so many ways,” UCLA Chancellor Gene Block says. “As dean, she has always focused on access and excellence. Her leadership, innovation, and dedication to her faculty, students, and staff were everywhere apparent. While I am sad to see her go, I know she will be an exceptional leader in Madison.”
Mnookin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a former visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, J.D. from Yale Law School and Ph.D. from M.I.T. A renowned authority on scientific evidence law, she is one of the most cited scholars in the
strategist, a great fundraiser, a great teacher, a great colleague, a great scholar, a great institution builder. Wisconsin is very lucky to have her as their new leader.”
Supporting Students and the Community Mnookin’s tenure as the dean of UCLA Law was characterized by a spirit of innovation, collaboration and excellence, achieved through the contributions of every member of the community.
“One of the many things I admire and like about Jennifer is that she is always interested in hearing alternative points of view and fosters a culture that supports this openness,” says alumnus Richard Sandler ’73, who chaired the law school’s board of advisers for several years during Mnookin’s deanship. “Even when we disagreed, I found her to be intellectually curious, fair minded and willing to listen. She leads with an open mind and an open door.”
That ethos drove many notable successes achieved by UCLA Law’s dynamic and celebrated professors and scholars during Mnookin’s deanship. During her tenure, the school hired academics and policymakers in tax law, technology and the law, immigration law, corporate law, health law and constitutional law, among other areas. The faculty as a whole steadily rose into the highest levels of rankings of law schools’ scholarly impact and citations. UCLA Law also enjoyed its best-ever overall ranking, in addition to No. 1 placements for environmental law and entertainment law.
Opening the doors to outstanding education was a priority for Mnookin, and she oversaw many successful efforts—including the creation of the Achievement Fellows program, which offers fulltuition scholarships to high-achieving students who have overcome significant hardships, and the First Gen Initiative, which supports UCLA Law’s growing number of first-generation college students attending law school. Under her leadership, the class of 2024 was 56% women, 49% students of color, 15% students who had no parent or guardian with a college degree and 27% of students were Pell recipients while undergraduates.
“Jennifer encouraged all of us to think big and think bold but also to get things done,” says Devon Carbado, the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law and UCLA’s former associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. “Her extraordinary ability to both envision and problem-solve will leave the law school more inclusive, more intellectually vibrant, more externally facing, and more student-centered than it has ever been.”
For Mnookin, that boldness has meant emphasizing community, equity, diversity and belonging. Among many other efforts on her watch, UCLA Law expanded its trailblazing 25-year-old Law Fellows Program, greatly enlarged its innovative UCLA Law Women LEAD alumnae network, welcomed the law school’s first vice dean for community and justice and created a number of new scholarships, including student-led initiatives on behalf of the Black Law Students Association and the Asian/Pacific Islander Law Students Association, as well as the landmark Graton Scholars, established to support tribal members and tribal advocates, which was made possible by a transformative $15 million gift from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Mnookin’s commitment to elevating student voices also led to her creation of the Dean’s Student Advisory Council (DSAC), an important avenue through
which students can become leaders and contribute to the shaping of their legal education.
“I was lucky to meet Dean Mnookin early on,” says recent graduate Sarah Pfander ’22, who served on DSAC as well as a task force that spearheaded curricular innovations for first-year law students, “and she was so supportive of students, wanting to hear from us and find actionable ways to implement our ideas for how to make our law school even better. That energy will certainly be missed at UCLA, and I am grateful for the mark it left on me and my three years here.”
An advocate for pedagogical innovation, Mnookin oversaw the creation of several cutting-edge courses and programs, including the Master of Legal Studies degree program, UCLA Law’s first new degree in a generation, which offers nonlawyer professionals training in legal issues that they encounter in a range of fields. The law school’s experiential education program also underwent substantial growth, including through a greatly expanded trial advocacy program that quickly put the law school on the map as one of the very best training grounds for trial advocates in the nation; in courses that teach legal skills vital to contemporary legal practice in areas including business law, technology and intellectual property; and additional legal clinics that allow students to directly serve veterans, immigrant families and documentary filmmakers, among others.
Allison Korn, UCLA Law’s former assistant dean for experiential education, highlights Mnookin’s emphasis on opening clinics, such as the Veterans Legal Clinic and the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, within the communities they serve: “She understands the important role that a public research institution must play both on- and off-campus and has led the growth to make it happen.”
Mnookin also championed success in student careers, including through new programs on professional development and expanded advising across public and private sectors. During her deanship, UCLA Law graduates garnered top career placements at America’s leading law firms at impressive and increasing rates. In addition, Mnookin led expansions of loan forgiveness that permit graduates to pursue a greater range of career options and grew UCLA Law’s public interest infrastructure, assisting graduates to earn the most competitive fellowships at rates matched by only three or four other law schools in the country.
Mnookin’s years as UCLA Law dean were marked by her collaborative vision and leadership in creating several high-impact, philanthropically supported centers that broadened the school’s reach into many of the most topical and timely areas of legal practice and that also linked to core faculty strengths and priorities.
Launched during her tenure were the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy; the Promise Institute for Human Rights; the Ziffren Institute for Media, Entertainment, Technology and Sports Law; the Center for Immigration Law and Policy; the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy; and the Program in Nonprofits and Philanthropy. Driving leadership on vital local, national, and global issues, these centers amplify the research of premier scholars and train students to work with leading advocates on issues that are likely to feature heavily in their work as lawyers.
Another remarkable success was Mnookin’s partnership with alumni and friends to build UCLA Law’s donor base and bring in transformative gifts. “As her board chair for a number of years, I still marvel at the way Jennifer can engage people in a shared vision about what the law school can do and be,” says Alicia Miñana de Lovelace ’87, now chair of the whole UCLA campus’s Foundation Board. “It is the key to her great success as a fundraiser. She instinctively knows how to connect a donor’s desire to do good in the world with the work of the school.”
During Mnookin’s deanship, UCLA Law raised more than $180 million. Her tenure included the most successful fundraising year in the school’s history, and five of the top six years. The law school exceeded its goal for the Centennial Campaign for UCLA by an impressive 20%. Mnookin was instrumental in securing several of the law school’s largest gifts ever, including $20 million for the Promise Institute for Human Rights, $15 million for scholarships and programs that benefit Native American nations and $11 million for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. She also helped secure meaningful support for endowed faculty chairs and student scholarships, among other fundraising aims.
During her final years as dean, Mnookin helped steer UCLA Law through the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, spurring adaptations to make student, faculty, and staff transitions to the remote environment—and back—as seamless as possible. At the same time, she fostered a sense of community as people in and around UCLA Law weathered the storm.
“Throughout her deanship, but particularly in the past two years, UCLA Law has thrived under her leadership,” says William Boyd, the Michael J. Klein Chair in Law and the faculty codirector of the Emmett Institute. “She is careful and deliberate. Her instincts and judgment are impeccable, and she does not shy away from making the hard calls. She also understands the importance of following through and turning words into durable institutional commitments.”
Mnookin’s service was also characterized by her commitment to UCLA as a whole and collaboration with other campus leaders. She was one of two deans in the Chancellor’s Leadership Cabinet during the pandemic, and she served for five years as chair of the Professional School Deans’ Council, a strategic means for collaboration and problem solving for the deans of UCLA’s 12 professional schools.
“Jennifer is a visionary with a keen sense of hope and possibility for the future, and her leadership combines wisdom, personal warmth and intellectual brilliance,” says Eileen Strempel, dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. “Her extraordinary tenure at UCLA is notable for her ability to navigate with grace while building consensus and shared purpose.”
“Jennifer made a wonderful impact on UCLA Law,” says alumnus Ralph Shapiro ’58, “opening our school up to a wider audience than it ever had before—with students, with faculty, and with our national reputation. She will be greatly missed but will have a huge and positive impact on the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”
At the University of Wisconsin, founded in 1848, Mnookin will oversee a 938-acre campus that includes 13 schools and colleges, nearly 48,000 students, more than 24,000 faculty and staff, almost half a million living alumni and a budget of more than $3.6 billion. Like UCLA, Wisconsin ranks among the top public universities in the country, and academic leaders across the country emphasize that Mnookin is poised to thrive there.
University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill says, “Jennifer Mnookin has been a national leader as a law dean because of her ability to see the challenges and opportunities ahead and her capacity to bring leaders with different views and interests to the table to work together. She is an inspired choice for one of the country’s great public research universities.”
“Jennifer was born to be the leader of a great research university like the University of Wisconsin,” says Michael Schill, who served as UCLA Law’s dean from 2004 to 2009 and is now the president of Northwestern. “She is incredibly smart, strategic, inspiring, warm and collaborative. She has been an amazing dean of one of the nation’s best law schools and has moved it dramatically forward in a short period of time.”
Says Mnookin, “I am incredibly excited for this next adventure and to become a Badger, but I will also be a Bruin for life. I will carry with me all that I have learned from my colleagues at the law school and across campus and the amazing students whom I have been privileged to teach and know.”
UCLA School of Law professor Russell Korobkin has been appointed to serve as the law school’s interim dean. He assumed his duties on June 13, replacing the outgoing dean, Jennifer L. Mnookin. In May, Mnookin was announced as the next chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Korobkin is the Richard C. Maxwell Distinguished Professor of Law and previously served as UCLA Law’s vice dean for graduate and professional education. In that role, he oversaw the law school’s innovative Master of Legal Studies program, which he developed over many years and established in 2020 to provide nonlawyer professionals with a rigorous course of study in legal principles, along with the school’s LL.M. degree program for international and domestic lawyers. From 2015 to 2019, Korobkin served as vice dean for academic and institutional affairs.
In announcing Korobkin’s appointment, Michael Levine, UCLA’s former interim executive vice chancellor and provost, said, “Throughout his career, Professor Korobkin has demonstrated a deep commitment to educating and elevating the next generation of lawyers and legal scholars. He is highly regarded for his energy and enthusiasm, his collaborative leadership style and his fair-minded approach to problem solving. Chancellor Block and I are confident that he will be a capable steward for our law school during this period of transition.”
Korobkin will serve as interim dean until a new dean is selected through a comprehensive national search. He is the third interim dean in the law school’s history, following Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Acting Chancellor Emeritus Norman Abrams, who served from 2003 to 2004, and David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus Stephen Yeazell, who was the school’s interim dean from 2009 to 2010.
“Russell is among the best leaders, educators and scholars with whom I have ever had the pleasure of serving,” Mnookin said, “and he has been a tremendous partner in the law school’s administration during the seven years of my deanship. Those in the UCLA Law community who have not had the chance to work with him will soon learn another fundamental truth about Russell: He is a thoroughly decent person and good friend. I am delighted that he has agreed to serve as interim dean—and to see just how much the law school will benefit from his leadership.”
A member of the UCLA Law faculty since 2001, Korobkin is among the nation’s leading authorities in the fields of negotiation and behavioral law and economics. He teaches courses in negotiation, contracts, private law, and law and economics, and he has published widely on these subjects. His book The Five Tool Negotiator: The Complete Guide to Bargaining Success (Liveright) received broad acclaim within the legal academy and beyond when it was published in 2021, and the article that he and Thomas Ulen published in the
KorobkinCalifornia Law Review in 2000, “Law and Behavioral Science: Removing the Rationality Assumption From Law and Economics,” is among the most cited law review articles of this century.
Korobkin is also the author or coauthor of textbooks on negotiation (Negotiation Theory & Strategy, 3d ed.) and contract law (K: A Common Law Approach to Contracts, 3d ed.), as well as coauthor of Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology (Yale University Press, 2007).
Before he came to UCLA Law, Korobkin held appointments at the University of Illinois’s College of Law and its Institute of Government and Public Affairs. He has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the University of Texas School of Law and has taught courses at the University of Arizona, the University of Houston, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Pepperdine University and Vanderbilt University, as well as at law schools in Germany, Israel, and Australia.
Korobkin earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford University, clerked for Judge James Buckley on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and was an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.
“To say that Jennifer leaves huge shoes to fill is a major understatement,” Korobkin said, “and I am honored to be able to build on her accomplishments as interim dean. UCLA Law has been a tremendous home to me for the past two decades—intellectually, creatively and personally. I am excited by the opportunity to give something back to the institution that I love and to try to help make it an even more excellent place. From our faculty, who are both world-renowned scholars and committed teachers, to our students, who bring passion and intellect to the study of law, to the best and most dedicated staff around, the people here truly make UCLA Law a fabulous place to be.”
With the start of the 2022–23 academic year, UCLA School of Law has welcomed a talented class of 310 J.D. students that is one of the most capable and promising in the school’s history.
The incoming Class of 2025 includes people from a wide range of backgrounds who have already proven themselves to be skilled and successful scholars, advocates and professionals. They are the best-credentialed in the school’s history, with a median LSAT score of 171 and a median undergraduate GPA of 3.90.
To mark the start of the new school year, incoming students and their families joined UCLA Law professors, staff members and
UCLA Law Fellows Program. The new J.D. students range in age from 20 to 45, their average age being 25. Women make up 58% of the class, 58% are California residents, and overall, students come from 33 states, the District of Columbia, and eight foreign countries. All told, they are fluent in at least 25 languages.
The class includes many undergraduate leaders, elite athletes, scientists, teachers, four Ph.D. holders, two Fulbright Award recipients, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, an Emmy Award winner, an ordained minister, a stand-up comedian, a chess master, two holders of black belts in martial arts, a certified barbecue judge from the Kansas City Barbecue Society, a performer of Xiangsheng traditional Chinese comedy, and a student who has hiked the full Pacific Crest Trail.
alumni on UCLA’s Dickson Court to celebrate the law school’s annual convocation ceremony.
In greeting the newest members of the UCLA Law family and setting them on their paths to success as lawyers and leaders of distinction and integrity, Interim Dean Russell Korobkin, Student Bar Association president Max Roemer ’23, and distinguished alumna Rasha Gerges Shields ’01 delivered speeches that underscored the law school’s abiding values of service, excellence, and community. Students also swore an Oath of Professionalism, which will guide them as they pursue their law degrees.
The new J.D. students were selected from nearly 7,300 applicants.
Students of color make up 58% of the incoming class. At least 18% of the class are first-generation students—the first in their families to have earned a college degree—a measure for which UCLA Law continues to stand out among all top-20 law schools nationwide. And seven members of the class graduated from the
In addition to a veteran of the U.S. Army, many members of the Class of 2025 are deeply committed to service in the public interest. They have worked for organizations including the Central Park Conservancy, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Jewish Family and Children’s Services, Planned Parenthood and Public Counsel.
Incoming students have also worked at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Ten have worked for senators, 13 have worked for members of the House of Representatives, and others have worked for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section, the Centers for Disease Control, the Geological Survey, the Census Bureau, and the Patent and Trademark Office.
In the private sphere, incoming J.D. students have worked at top companies in the media, technology, entertainment, business and the law, including Microsoft, Capital One, the New York Yankees, TikTok, NBC’s Today show, HBO and many top law firms.
Alongside its outstanding new class of J.D. law students, UCLA School of Law has welcomed many exceptional lawyers, scholars, and professionals who are pursuing LL.M., S.J.D., and M.L.S. degrees during the 2022–23 academic year.
The 230 lawyers who are pursuing an LL.M., or master of laws degree, hail from 36 countries on six continents and range in age from 20 to 52; 58% are women. They hold law degrees from many renowned schools, including Cambridge University, the Sorbonne, the University of Tokyo, the London School of Economics, Renmin University of China, the University of British Columbia, Seoul National University, the University of Munich, and the University of California, Berkeley.
All are successful legal professionals, having worked at leading international law firms; organizations including KPMG, Panasonic, and the State Bar of California; and international groups such as the Northern Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in India, the Japanese Ministry of Finance, the South African Human Rights Commission, the Hungarian Ministry for Innovation and Technology and the Icelandic Ministry of Social Affairs. One has worked for the vice president of Paraguay. Two are judges. Five are Fulbright Scholars.
The three new S.J.D., or doctor of juridical science, students are leading scholars whose projects include an investigation of an Islamic framework for climate justice, research regarding the Colombian Council of State’s consultative function, and an examination into the regulation of encrypted messaging platforms.
UCLA Law’s incoming students who are pursuing an M.L.S., or master of legal studies degree, are topflight and mostly midcareer professionals who are seeking an in-depth education in the law that does not lead to a career in the practice of law.
They total 50 students, 36 of whom are attending classes parttime. Sixty-four percent identify as female, and 68% are members of historically underrepresented groups. They range in age from 21 to 61. Nearly 30% hold advanced degrees in the sciences, business, education and more. They earned undergraduate degrees from Brown, Emory, Stanford, Yale, and UCLA, among other leading universities.
A large number of the incoming M.L.S. students are accomplished executives and professionals: 54% are chief executives, vice presidents,
directors or managers, with an average professional work experience of 13 years. They have held leadership positions with premier companies, such as a biomedical firm, a resort and casino, a homeless service authority, a food company, and entertainment production companies. They include a public safety and criminal justice reporter, a UCLA football athlete, an award-winning screenwriter, a judicial courtroom assistant, a software engineer and a pharmacist.
During an invitation-only event on January 28, 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and White House staff members applauded UCLA School of Law and other law schools nationwide for their work in addressing the country’s housing and eviction crisis.
The law schools joined forces after Garland issued a call to action last year, asking for a united effort to confront the crisis. Since then, students from 99 law schools worked more than 81,000 hours to provide legal assistance to people who are unhoused or housing insecure.
“Five months ago,” Garland said, “I asked the legal community to answer the call to help Americans facing eviction. Law students and lawyers from across the country stepped up to take on cases and assist their clients and communities at a time when our country needed it the most.”
For members of the UCLA Law community, the call was easy to answer.
Says Brad Sears, associate dean of public interest law and David Sanders Distinguished Scholar of Law & Policy, “From providing eviction defense and mediating disagreements between tenants and landlords, to conducting cutting-edge research measuring the scope and impact of the eviction crisis, the UCLA Law community has played a critical role in addressing the housing crisis in Los Angeles.”
Numerous ongoing projects at the law school are addressing the needs of housing-insecure Angelenos, and in response to Garland’s call, UCLA Law launched additional efforts to curb a housing crisis that has grown worse during the pandemic.
The school placed an eviction defense and prevention fellow with the Eviction Defense Project of the nonprofit law firm Bet Tzedek who was tasked with client intake, preparing training materials for pro bono attorneys to assist individuals with applications to the U.S.’s Emergency Relief Assistance Program, helping lead “know your rights” workshops for vulnerable populations and providing direct counsel and advice under the supervision of Bet Tzedek attorneys.
Additionally, the school’s clinics mobilized to meet the housing challenge: The Veterans Legal Clinic began advising households on landlord-tenant issues, and the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic began providing legal consultations to housing-challenged families of students in the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, where the clinic is located. Students also volunteered with El Centro Legal Clinics and performed 1,485 hours of pro bono work on housing matters. They collaborated with community organizations dedicated to tenants’ rights, workers’ rights, reentry from incarceration, survivors of domestic violence, and unemployment insurance.
Law schools joined forces after Garland issued a call to action last year, asking for a united effort to confront the housing and eviction crisis. Since then, students from 99 law schools worked more than 81,000 hours to provide legal assistance to people who are unhoused or housing insecure.
“When the attorney general issued his call for the legal community last fall,” said former Dean Jennifer L. Mnookin, “I knew we would see an outpouring of support and action from our UCLA community, and I am terrifically proud of what everyone has done and continues to do. We are also very fortunate to have excellent community partners in Los Angeles—the legal services providers who are on the front lines of fighting the housing crisis.
“The breadth and depth of what our community has done to help people during the crisis of the past two years is incredibly impressive, but it also shouldn’t surprise anyone. That is the UCLA Law way.”
Two members of the UCLA School of Law’s Board of Advisors, the group of distinguished law school alumni who provide strategic input on faculty and student recruitment, alumni outreach, long-
been immense. In addition to her work on the school’s Board of Advisors, she has served on the centennial campaign committees of both the law school and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. She is a past president of La Raza Law Alumni Association, and she and her husband, Rob Lovelace, the vice chairman and president of Capital Group Companies, gave the founding gift for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the law school and have made significant gifts to the school’s Critical Race Studies Program.
Her philanthropic activities also extend to the wider Los Angeles community. She is the founding chair of the board of directors of the Learning Rights Law Center, a nonprofit formed by UCLA Law alumni to assist low-income families and advocate for their children, and serves as a volunteer attorney for the center. She is also on the board of Human Rights Watch and was recently named chair of the board of the Nature Conservancy Caribbean program. She also serves as cochair of the Pacific Council’s development committee.
term priorities, and other topics of interest to the school—have been elevated to the role of co-chair.
Vanessa Lavely ’08 and Samuel Fischer ’82 assumed their new leadership positions on the board beginning with the group’s April meeting. They succeeded Alicia Miñana de Lovelace ’87, who joined the board in 2012 and has served as board chair since 2020 and who is now taking on the role of chair of the Board of Directors of the UCLA Foundation.
The appointments were announced by Jennifer L. Mnookin, the School of Law’s former dean.
“Alicia Miñana de Lovelace has been an extraordinary leader of our Board of Advisors,” said Mnookin. “Through her thoughtful and strategic approach to a range of opportunities and challenges faced by the school, she has been a valued partner. Talented and tireless, she departs with my gratitude and heartfelt thanks for her enormous contributions to UCLA Law.
“Vanessa and Sam have a pair of big shoes to fill, but I know that they will do just that,” added Mnookin.
As chair, Miñana de Lovelace set a model for a high level of board engagement and activity, introduced a set of working groups to partner with law school staff on important areas of the school’s operations and mission and helped expand board membership to be more diverse across geography and practice area.
Miñana de Lovelace has practiced law in Los Angeles for more than three decades and today focuses primarily on nonprofit board work. Her contributions to UCLA Law and the university have
Lavely, the first board leader to be based outside Los Angeles, is a litigation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in the firm’s New York office, where she handles antitrust, intellectual property, environmental, commercial and securities litigation for corporate clients. One of Crain’s New York Business ’s “Notable Women in Law” in 2022, Lavely has also been named a Future Star by Benchmark Litigation (2019–2022) and was featured on its “40 and Under Hot List” (2019–2021).
“I am honored to take the baton from Alicia, who has given so much to UCLA Law,” says Lavely. “I look forward to collaborating with the school’s leadership, my co-chair, Sam, and our fellow board members to continue the great work of those who have come before us. Our board is highly engaged, and we are fortunate to have a deep bench of diverse talents and backgrounds. For my part, I aim to expand our presence here in New York, while still visiting campus as often as possible—especially during winter!”
Sam Fischer is a partner at the Century City–based entertainment law firm Ziffren Brittenham, where he represents leading actors, writers, directors, producers, executives and companies in motion pictures, television and new media. The Hollywood Reporter named Fischer one the “100 Power Lawyers in the Entertainment Industry” and designated him a Legal Legend in 2022.
“I am terrifically excited to work with UCLA Law’s leadership and Vanessa Lavely,” says Fischer, “and to work with all our board members to build on the wonderful legacy established by Alicia Miñana de Lovelace.”
Samuel Fischer ’82Critical Race Studies launches innovative new project that identifies, tracks, and analyzes measures that restrict truth-telling in education
Pausing diversity training, withdrawing educational resources, ignoring pleas from community members, students and parents to advance antiracist teaching and curriculum—these are specific instances of real-world local, state and national restrictions on access to truthful information about structural racism through a disinformation campaign to reject Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Critical Race Studies (CRS), the first law-based CRT program in the country, recently launched CRT Forward to address the recent assault on CRT while also highlighting the past, present and future contributions of the theory. Using the expertise of the unique CRS program and the capacity of UCLA Law, the project works extensively to advance a better understanding of the patterns and trends that characterize the assaults on CRT, as well as their overwhelming perverseness.
A foundational $400,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation’s Racial and Equity Fund provided the resources to add CRT Forward Project Director Taifha Natalee Alexander ’21 as leader of the project. An alumna of Georgetown Law, Alexander has more than ten years of experience in institutionalizing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She earned her LL.M., with a specialization in CRS, from UCLA Law. “The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks aimed at restricting the ability to speak truthfully about race, racism, and systemic racism,” says Alexander. “It is also my hope that students will continue to have access to CRT and understand the ways it can address some of the most pressing racial and social issues of our time.”
A critical component of CRT Forward is the Tracking Project, an interactive database designed to allow users to gain a deeper understanding of the magnitude of the attacks on antiracism efforts in K–12 education, higher education, government agencies and private businesses. The Tracking Project database can be accessed through the CRT Forward website, where visitors can gather information about anti-CRT activity at the local, state and federal levels.
Tracking Project researchers have screened more than 26,000 media articles and identified over 500 instances of anti-CRT activity. The project database consists of multiple unique features that allow users to:
• Analyze the substance of anti-CRT efforts, including (a), the type of conduct that is restricted or required; (b), the institution targeted for regulation; (c), the specific features of the conduct being targeted; and (d), enforcement mechanisms used to regulate the conduct.
• Go beyond a focus on state and federal legislation to include local government activity and nonlegislative actions, such as regulations, executive directives, and the opinions of attorneys general—all in a single location.
• Track patterns and find information relevant to their purposes through interactive filters.
An early finding of the Tracking Project is that antiCRT activity is more extensive than previously reported. Although media reporting often focuses on anti-CRT measures in traditionally conservative states, the Tracking Project has revealed, through its enhanced comprehensive scope, that 49 states have proposed antiCRT activity.
CRT Forward’s Tracking Project is made possible by a dedicated leadership team comprising Alexander, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Cheryl I. Harris, Assistant Professor LaToya Baldwin Clark, Professor Noah Zatz and CRS Executive Director Jasleen Kohli. Additionally, the team includes undergraduate and law school research assistants, as well as law librarians.
The CRT Forward leadership team is deeply committed to broadening the accessibility of the data and encouraging the rigorous analysis of findings by engaging wide and diverse audiences. This summer, members of the team hosted an inaugural event: Mapping Anti-CRT Politics. Alexander, Harris, and Baldwin Clark shared data trends, including connections between traditionally nonpartisan school board elections and the pervasiveness of the anti-CRT disinformation campaign.
Harris notes that the Tracking Project offers a unique opportunity to disseminate the scholarship and research of CRS, saying, “CRT Forward is our first real foray into taking some of the ideas that we have and bringing them into the level of helping policymakers, litigators and ordinary people with some of the framing and information that they need in order to deal with the on-the-ground circumstances that they’re facing.”
Along with the Tracking Project, CRT Forward will continue to develop substantial resources for the advancement of new ideas and legal tools to support antiracist education, training and research. “We need CRT to understand this assault on racial justice, where even naming structural racism gets portrayed as unfair to white people,” says Zatz. “And we need CRT to develop legal theories of education and free speech that not only blunt these attacks but place antiracism at the center of a democratic society.”
For more information, and to learn about the project, visit crtforward.org
This spring saw the realization of a much-lauded project from the Promise Institute for Human Rights: the launch of its Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative. A resource for academics, students, scholars and activists, the initiative offers a catalog of materials designed for people working on racial justice issues at any level who wish to adopt an international human rights frame in their work.
The initiative is the culmination of efforts by core Promise faculty E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Ü. Bâli with the institute’s newest hire, Racial Justice Policy Counsel S. Priya Morley. Together, they spearheaded events and materials on an interdisciplinary and critical approach to engaging with international law and human rights, particularly by combining critical race theory (CRT) and Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) to dismantle structural racism and the continuing impacts of colonialism around the world.
Describing how they arrived at this work, Bâli and Achiume recounted similar experiences in their legal educations and early careers. Each had perceived a marked dissonance between the field of law as usually taught in academic settings and their own lived experiences.
Bâli noted, “As a student, I was drawn by emancipatory projects, particularly in the Middle East. But the region I was most interested in was made up of states cast as rogue actors, treated as resistant to change, and pathologized. In contrast, my own engagement with the region as a young adult told an entirely different story: I was constantly among populations grappling with the aftermath of profoundly traumatic histories of colonization and who were systematically the subjects of further imperial intervention. When I got to law school, I wanted a vocabulary to help me engage with the character of these ongoing imperial projects that were everywhere obscured.”
“My journey is similar to Professor Bâli’s in many ways,” said Achiume. “Mine was a difficult journey—trying to make sense of law’s relationship to the things I care about yet struggling to fully articulate dynamics playing out in the world with the existing legal vocabulary. When starting my career, I intended to work as a South African lawyer for refugees and asylum seekers. Following xenophobic violence in the country in 2008, I was challenged to describe the racialized nature of the harms my clients and others were subjected to. Grappling with that took me on my path to an academic context, to UCLA, where I had the good fortune to be surrounded by CRT theorists and then exposed to TWAIL scholarship. Along the way I felt my world being transformed. Finding these two disciplines has opened doors.”
Morley, reflecting on her own research and work in human rights and migration, noted that “an approach informed by CRT and TWAIL provides human rights scholars and practitioners with tools to describe what many people who experience intersecting marginalization already know to be true, but which so much of law and legal theory doesn’t capture.” Morley’s creation of materials on this area of scholarship for UCLA Law students and others is intended to be an entry point for people interested in learning more.
Promise Executive Director Kate Mackintosh said, “The Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative is at the core of what Promise aims to do—support deep and critical thinking about urgent human rights issues, while connecting with people outside of academia and law. I hope the resources are useful and salient for anyone thinking about racial justice and human rights.”
The questions about inequality, international law and human rights being explored by TWAIL, CRT and human rights scholars are important ones for anyone trying to make sense of the world. As Bâli stressed, UCLA Law is uniquely positioned to support this work: “Perhaps the luckiest break I’ve had in my career was coming to UCLA where I could figure out how to address the questions which I was told were out of bounds.”
Aslı Ü. Bâli S. Priya Morley
According to the World Resources Institute, the tropics lost more than 27 million acres of forest cover in 2021 alone—an area about the size of Guatemala—including more than 9 million acres of tropical primary forests. That’s equivalent to a rate of about 10 football fields a minute. Losing tropical forests has devastating consequences for local communities as well as for biodiversity, habitat and climate change. In fact, the United Nations Environment Program estimates that global deforestation and forest degradation contribute 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
One organization focused on this enormous challenge is the Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force, a network of 39 states and provinces in 10 countries—Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain and the United States—working to protect tropical forests, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and take large-scale action on this global humanitarian, economic and ecological crisis.
In July 2022, UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) became the home of the GCF Task Force, which is led by William Boyd, the Michael J. Klein Chair in Law, a professor at IoES, and the faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute.
Boyd has been involved with the GCF Task Force since the initiative was launched by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008. The group had been based at the University of Colorado, Boulder (where Boyd was a professor), which will continue to support the network through a sub-award from UCLA. “It’s exciting and fitting that the GCF Task Force is back in California where it started,” Boyd says. The group has also been supported for many years by the government of Norway and other partners.
The task force’s move to UCLA coincided with the naming of a project director, Jason Gray, and the launch of a focused effort to integrate, enhance, and leverage UCLA’s broader expertise on tropical forest research and policy through coordination with the law school, IoES, the Center for Tropical Research and the Congo Basin Institute, among others. This integration of efforts within UCLA is expected to provide opportunities for students at the law school and beyond to gain valuable experience and support university-to-university collaborations within GCF Task Force member jurisdictions.
The mission of the GCF Task Force “is to empower state and provincial leaders to implement innovative jurisdictional programs that protect tropical forests and promote low-emissions development.”
The task force connects these government leaders with civil society, the private sector, Indigenous peoples, local communities and other stakeholders to share experiences, mobilize technical and legal assistance and unlock financial support to protect forests and address climate change.
A key element
inequality, critically important
“The
Boyd says. “The only way to save forests is to build a new forest economy that provides meaningful livelihoods and economic opportunity for all people and communities. This can only be built on homegrown, local knowledge, innovation and applied problem solving.”
are the same
This means the GCF Task Force’s efforts focus closely on local economies and local needs. “Each of our member states and provinces understands its own context better than outside experts,” says Gray. “So we work to support them in developing additional partnerships and actions within these communities. Deforestation affects the world as a whole, but it’s people at the local and regional level who can turn ideas into action, and action into results.”
Earlier this year, a meeting of the GCF Task Force in Manaus, Brazil, led to the creation of a new policy framework, two years in the making, that outlines steps for each jurisdiction in the network to achieve an ambitious goal of reducing tropical deforestation by at least 80% by the end of this decade. A few examples of actions designed to achieve this goal are public-private partnerships to encourage zero-deforestation commodities such as palm oil and beef, the recognizing and enforcing of Indigenous land tenure rights, innovative bioeconomy programs, assessment of carbon market opportunities, and the combating of illegal forest clearing. Says Gray, “Supporting our member states and provinces to implement their tailored jurisdictional strategies to reduce deforestation will have far-reaching and beneficial impacts, both locally and globally.”
Boyd acknowledges that reducing deforestation demands long-term investment. “Reducing deforestation requires capital from wealthy countries,” he says. “But there is potentially a substantial return on that investment in multiple dimensions: reducing the impact of global warming, preserving the world’s biodiversity, protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities and increasing the economic possibilities for people in emerging economies.”
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Third-year UCLA Law student Eimile Nolan decided on law school in part because she saw crises playing out in the news and wondered what she could do to help. When she learned that the law school was offering a short-term project during the 2022 January term to help Afghan evacuees seeking asylum, she signed up right away.
After the success of the J-Term miniclinic, which conducted intake interviews for 10 individuals with the goal of referring them for representation by the local nonprofit Human Rights First, Nolan and three other students went on to represent two asylum applicants as part of a new, advanced clinic offered in the 2022 spring semester. The cases were heard by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) at the end of the semester. This fall, both clients and their law student representatives were elated to learn that USCIS approved their cases.
According to Nina Rabin, the director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, who organized and oversaw the J-Term project and the advanced clinic, the law school responded quickly when the possibility arose to continue representing some of the J-Term clients. UCLA Law arranged for course credit and provided a faculty appointment to an additional supervising attorney, Laura Diamond, a Los Angeles–area immigration lawyer. “It was great,” says Rabin, “to see the law school mobilize to get an urgently needed, targeted new clinic off the ground rapidly.”
According to Nolan, students in the J-Term miniclinic spent a significant amount of time training before conducting a single screening interview of each evacuee.
In contrast, the advanced clinic students in the spring semester met with their clients about once a week and prepared an extensive brief and supporting declarations and materials before representing the clients in all-day interviews with USCIS. The cases were part of a program initiated to streamline asylum hearings of Afghan
evacuees displaced after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
Among those represented in the advanced clinic were a women’s rights advocate and a high-ranking official in the former Afghan government. Nolan and a partner worked with the women’s rights advocate.
In an asylum case, the applicant must show that they have a well-founded fear of persecution if forced to return to their country of origin. Nolan says it was sometimes challenging to draw out the client’s story and form it into a declaration in her own words, with the help of an interpreter.
It took several interviews, Nolan says, for the client to become comfortable speaking with the students about her experiences. During one session, Nolan and her partner examined photos of the client working with women in rural Afghanistan. Hearing the client describe the photos and speak about the encouragement she gave to the women to work and be independent was a turning point for the clinic team.
The clinic also taught Nolan about more prosaic real-life lawyering skills in systems like immigration that haven’t completely switched to electronic filing. On the day the brief had to be postmarked, in advance of the asylum interview, she says she ran across campus with a thick envelope stuffed with the brief and declarations to make it to the post office before it closed: “It was the first time I felt like a real lawyer!”
Rabin says the clinic has provided an opportunity for students to make a small contribution to the vast undertaking of helping thousands of Afghan evacuees find stability and security as they begin moving on with their lives in a new country. The clinic has taken one new case during the fall semester, and Rabin hopes it will be able to continue working with Afghan evacuees as long as there is a need.
Nolan says she was attracted to UCLA Law because it offered a variety of options within public interest law. She says she wasn’t thinking about immigration law as a career path until she worked with the clinic. Now, she says, “if I did this forever, I’d be happy with it.”
Nina Rabin, director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic
“Think like a lawyer without being a lawyer.”
That’s a big part of the goal of UCLA’s Master of Legal Studies Program, introduced in 2020, which was designed for working professionals who need a solid understanding of the law and its application in their businesses and organizations. As the M.L.S. program enters its third full year, Assistant Dean Jason Fiske says that its graduates are already making their mark in business, nonprofit organizations and the entertainment and sports sectors. “Graduates of the program are putting their legal training to work,” he says. “Most of the students have great real-world experience when they come into this program, and their experience here makes them even more well prepared to succeed.”
In fact, M.L.S. graduates learn about the law and its applications in ways that are immediately useful to them in their careers, as these stories of recent graduates attest.
“Could propel me further on my career path.”
For David Holtkamp ’21, the M.L.S. degree was key to landing his current job as a human resources director at National Geographic “The Employment Law course is directly relevant to my work,” he says. “National Geographic uses a lot of independent contractors, like photographers shooting wildlife in Africa or digital artists creating content for specific stories. My coursework definitely enhanced my knowledge of employment law and HR compliance.”
Holtkamp enrolled in the program because he wanted to distinguish himself from his peers. “A lot of HR professionals have certifications like PHR [Professional in Human Resources] or SHRM-CP [Society for Human Resources Management–Certified Professional],” he says. “I knew that an advanced degree from a distinguished law school could propel me further on my career path.”
“Challenging and rigorous—but rewarding.”
For Ryan Carter ’22, the M.L.S. program was challenging, but the outcome was “rewarding,” he says, both for his work—Carter is an editor at the Southern California News Group, focusing on metro news and politics—and for himself personally. “I discovered new research techniques that helped me in my work,” he says. “I learned a lot more about how the legal system works and got much more attuned to the impact of legal questions as a leader in my organization and in the substance of the content we publish. And just getting through it all tapped some newfound confidence in myself.”
Carter adds that “the solidarity with classmates was huge,” and says, “The diversity of our cohort, in terms of professional and life experience, was among the most valuable aspect of the program.” Carter was chosen by his classmates as the M.L.S. spokesperson at the 2021–22 graduation in June.
Trioscope Studios in Florida is an award-winning producer of filmed entertainment that fuses live action and animation and has created a technology platform for its brand of “enhanced hybrid animation.”
Trioscope’s chief financial officer, Chester Rodeheaver ’21, sought the M.L.S. degree because he constantly works with in-house lawyers and outside legal teams. “As I moved into upper management, I realized I needed a better understanding of legal concepts,” he says. “At the M.L.S. program, I learned a lot about copyrights, nondisclosure agreements, contracts, publicity rights, patent law, and even nonfungible tokens. I’m on the phone with lawyers every day, and now I have a lot more insight into what they’re saying and how Trioscope should move forward.”
Rodeheaver, who completed the program in three semesters (two remotely from Miami and one on campus in Los Angeles), also found the experience to be a great networking opportunity. “I left the program with a great group of friends,” he says, “and even hired two people I met during the M.L.S. program to work with Trioscope.”
“I’m using the skills I learned in the M.L.S. program every day.”
That’s how Michelle Edgar ’22 describes one of the biggest benefits of earning her M.L.S. degree at UCLA Law. With a background in music marketing—she was a former vice president at Epic Records and is currently head of strategic partnerships at LiveOne Media in Santa Monica—Edgar enrolled in the program to acquire “more tools and better skill sets” that could help her be more effective in structuring deals in the entertainment industry. “I knew an understanding of the law would be great as I pursue my career,” she says, “and would help me pivot to a new sector—sports and NIL [name, image and likeness deals for athletes].” Edgar also recently co-launched SoundBytes Collective to help build community among innovative marketers, and founded Music Unites, a nonprofit supporting music education, and the XX Project, a network of female leaders.
Edgar acknowledges that it wasn’t easy to work at her job and complete the degree at the same time—“It was one of the hardest things I ever did”—but she found a lot of support in the community of other M.L.S. students: “This really broadened my worldview.”
According to Russell Korobkin, the interim dean of the law school, the Master of Legal Studies Program represents another avenue through which UCLA Law fulfills its mission of using legal education to create the next generation’s leaders. “Having a solid working knowledge of the law is a tremendous asset for ambitious people in all kinds of business and nonprofit sectors,” he says. “The interest in our approach to the M.L.S. is rising, and we expect the degree to become an important component of our offerings to students and to society.”
“…a better understanding of legal concepts…”
On a Friday in October, Greg Sarris, the tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, met with UCLA Law’s Graton Scholars, a group of students whose full scholarships were made possible by a $15 million gift from the tribe Sarris leads.
Over breakfast, the students told Sarris about their backgrounds and goals. In a conversation later that day, Sarris was enthusiastic about meeting the students and repeatedly described the encounter as heartwarming.
“I felt, ‘Boy, have we done the right thing in funding the scholarships,’” Sarris says. “I just felt they were so eager, so serious and dedicated to what they were studying and what they wanted to do with their lives.”
In 2022, the tribe followed its initial gift with $4 million to endow two professorships. The original gift was the largest ever by a tribe to a law school and one of the largest from a tribe to a university. The Graton Rancheria gifts not only continue the law school’s legacy of centering Native Nations law, they also bolster the ongoing work of its Native Nations Law & Policy Center.
According to 2L Shara Burwell, a member of the inaugural class of Graton Scholars, who arrived on campus in fall 2021, “UCLA is a unicorn” for its Native-focused classes and opportunities for student involvement. She credits Sarris and the tribe for expanding those opportunities and for allowing her to pursue her interest in federal Indian law.
In 1977, Sarris earned an undergraduate English degree from UCLA. After college, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in modern thought and literature from Stanford University; he later returned to UCLA as a professor. From 1989 to 2001, he taught courses including creative writing and American Indian literature. Eventually, he stepped away from academia to work with his biological father’s tribe to regain status as a federally recognized tribe. Sarris became an unlikely expert on Native law, as well as the tribe’s chairman.
When the tribe began discussing a major gift to a university, it was not a foregone conclusion that UCLA would be the recipient. The tribe “didn’t want to just give [the gift] to an institution that I felt [was] so important and [that I] had a longstanding relationship with,” Sarris says, “but I wanted to make sure for the good of all of us, that we gave the money to the institution that would most assure success.”
Breadth of opportunities in Native law
UCLA Law was a good choice for the tribe’s gift because of the breadth and depth of its Native Nations Law & Policy Center and related programs. Two of the major catalysts of those programs are Professor Emerita Carole Goldberg and Professor Angela Riley, whose backgrounds and experience illustrate the many opportunities available in Native Nations law at UCLA.
Goldberg grew up in a Jewish community in Chicago and didn’t learn about Native law until she took a Native American law course at Stanford Law School. Her research for that class resulted in a 100-page article that influenced tribal litigation up to the Supreme Court and led to a career in tribal law.
Riley, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, was raised on a working farm on former Native lands in rural Oklahoma, where her family was often below the poverty line. As an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, she was a “voracious student” with an interest in Indian rights and racial justice. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Riley came to California and eventually became the director of the Native Nations Law & Policy Center at UCLA Law.
Riley and Goldberg emphasize that Native law is a broad field. “I’ve pivoted from civil rights to criminal jurisdiction to cultural property,” says Riley. “I learn new things all the time.”
Of the Graton Rancheria gifts, Goldberg says, “What I’m excited about is both the increased expansion of the subject areas that can be given serious attention and the synergies among our scholars and areas of attention.”
UCLA Law alumna Christina Snider ’13—a member of the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians—is the tribal affairs secretary to Governor Gavin Newsom. She credits her career success in large part to the UCLA network.
“What UCLA had before [the Graton gifts],” she says, “is this massive network of both Native law students and attorneys and alumni and non-Native allies that were there to be a resource and be a network for you to lean on. Now you’ll really be able to see that kind of work and opportunities supported in a way that we’ve never seen before.”
Future lawyers will tackle “big challenges”
Sarris says the gifts are particularly important in light of “big challenges that Native people are facing.” He says current challenges include a case pending before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, as well as laws relating to Native-run gaming facilities.
“More and more we need legal rights,” Sarris says. “We need lawyers, advisers, to help chart our battle against those who would undo what we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
As one of those future lawyers, Burwell says she was influenced to pursue Native law after working with Indigenous women for a nonprofit in Peru and by reconnecting with her own family history and the story of her grandmother, a member of the Ojibwe tribe who was taken from her reservation as a child and adopted into a white family. Burwell says she is fortunate for the Graton Scholarship and UCLA Law’s strong community of Native students and professors. “I feel very, very lucky to go here,” she says. “I wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. I feel lucky to know the people who work here and Chairman Sarris.”
In the challenging past few years for oral advocacy, with the infamous cat-filter lawyer and the Supreme Court’s mysterious toilet flush, the UCLA Law moot court team didn’t just survive—it thrived.
The members of last year’s Moot Court Honors Board—the student group that manages the university’s moot court program— began law school in 2019. Many of them took part during their first year, before the pandemic, in the Skye Donald Memorial Moot Court Competition, UCLA Law’s internal competition, which is open exclusively to 1Ls. This past spring, after two years of remote competitions, the moot court year at UCLA culminated in the Roscoe Pound Moot Court Competition, back in person.
In the interim, the team smoothly ran the school’s four annual intramural competitions and UCLA Law’s 10th Annual Cybersecurity Moot Court Competition, in addition to winning accolades in competitions across the country.
Honors Board members Ariana Bustos and John Cagan recently won the 2022 Uvaldo Herrera National Moot Court Competition sponsored by the Hispanic National Bar Association. Bustos also received the competition’s award for best oral advocate.
At the Duberstein Bankruptcy Moot Court Competition, hosted by St. John’s University School of Law, Kaitlyn Hittelman, Rachel Berman and Matt Snyder took home second place out of 56 teams and were awarded for one of the top four best briefs. Isabelle Geczy and Kimaya Abreu advanced to the semifinals of the Giles Sutherland Intellectual Property Moot Court Competition, sponsored by the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
The moot court program’s accomplishments are even more remarkable because the program is almost entirely run by students.
“You’re an entrepreneur,” says Cagan of the juggling act of running a moot court competition. In addition to writing the problem—a “perfect storm” of Fourth Amendment gray areas—for one of last year’s two upperclass competitions, he and the other board members organized seating, meals, fundraising, and all other aspects of the competition.
“It’s not a skill set they normally teach in law school,” notes Lecturer in Law David Babbe ’81, the moot court’s adviser.
Acknowledging similarities between the practice of law and the hectic process of organizing a moot court competition, Honors Board member Andrew Hill remarks, “No matter how much you plan for everything, you can’t really plan for everything.”
Despite the challenges, last year’s Honors Board left its unique mark on the program.
The Roscoe Pound Competition—in which the winners from the two internal upperclass competitions compete—featured an honors
reception. It was a first for the 71-year-old competition, which this year concluded with Samantha Lonergan ’23 being named the winner after a highly competitive final round.
The board also secured an all-star panel of guest judges, which included Judge John B. Owens and Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw ’79, both judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and Justice Joshua Paul Groban, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court.
Before the Skye Donald Competition for 1Ls last fall, the board hosted a series of training workshops for the first time. A competition for first-year students is a relative rarity among law school moot court programs, and according to Hittelman, almost a third of the 1L class participated in the 2022 event.
The 1L competition is designed to be as friendly to beginners as possible. After the first year, a range of opportunities are available for competition and leadership. “If you want to get involved in moot court, generally everyone can,” says Hittelman. This variety has led to a diverse range of students participating in the program.
Bustos, last year’s Honors Board president, was involved in moot court in college and had her sights set on moot court from day one at UCLA.
Hill, on the other hand, worked as an engineer and hadn’t always planned on law school. In his first year, he sometimes felt that he was at a disadvantage because his background was somewhat unorthodox. Moot court helped him develop as an advocate and “be the lawyer I really wanted to be.”
After graduation, Hill, Bustos, and Hittelman started as associates at large law firms, while Cagan began a clerkship with Judge Wardlaw.
“The first couple of years [in practice], it’s hard,” says Babbe, who participated in UCLA Law’s moot court as a student and litigated for several years before transitioning to academia. Given the steep learning curve, the moot court experience gives new lawyers a leg up. “[You know] what you should be doing,” Babbe says, “when you step up in a courtroom and represent actual clients.”
Hittelman says she appreciates the willingness of the UCLA Law community to come together, including all the students and alumni it took to pull off the first in-person moot court event at the law school since the pandemic.
“If you’re an attorney,” Bustos adds, “and you get an email from moot court that says please come judge, we’d love you to judge.”
Janai Nelson ’96, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was selected as UCLA Law’s 71st Commencement keynote speaker—and she delivered on every level: heartfelt congratulations to the graduates and their families, a sober assessment of today’s issues, and hopeful reminders of the challenges and opportunities for this new generation of lawyers and leaders.
Nelson recalled her own sense of “exhilaration and trepidation” when she graduated in 1996, “knowing that your daily life at UCLA Law is about to come to an end, but the future you worked so hard to obtain is just about to begin.” She spoke of a sit-in she had participated in to protest Proposition 209—which banned race-based affirmative action— adding, “Little did we know then that 25 years later we’d still be fighting…in the Supreme Court to defend affirmative action…under the misnomer of critical race theory… Prop 209 was a harbinger of the future that you are now inheriting.”
—JANAI NELSON ’96She alluded to other current concerns—including the pandemic, climate change, and war—but focused her speech on the fact that “our own democracy is in turmoil.”
But she was also hopeful, saying, “You will lead a future that hangs in the balance, but also one that has the promise to become one of the country’s greatest moments of transformation…. There is a future where the United States is a vibrant, thriving, inclusive democracy, but we have to choose to take that path and to continually do the work to preserve and perfect it.
“Democracy is an action , not an inevitability.”
Although Nelson acknowledged that “not one generation could or should be asked to solve problems centuries in the making,” she said that “we as lawyers all have a special assignment to see both the full threat and the full opportunity before us.”
She continued, “You are entering the legal profession at a pivotal moment in our democracy, and there is a privilege in the power that you hold. Each of you enters this exclusive profession with the tools, the skills, the acumen, and the status that less than one percent of this country’s population possesses.”
Nelson also provided some practical guidance on putting that privilege to work, encouraging the graduates “not to lament about the state of our democracy from the sidelines…instead use your power to help lead the charge.” She recommended several possibilities: “Get involved in local elections, not only as voters but as poll workers, as volunteer lawyers on Election Day…represent indigent clients pro bono, serve on a bar association to uphold the ethics of the profession.”
In addition, Nelson encouraged the graduates to commit to lifelong learning—“not only to hone your craft as a lawyer but also to better understand the dynamic world.”
Despite the reality of what she called “an existential moment in the American experience,” Nelson said that she was hopeful about the future: “When I look out at you, the class of 2022 and the promise that you hold, you give me renewed energy.…Find a way to do justice from your perch in the world.”
The conferring of degrees took place after Nelson’s stirring speech, and the cheers and ovations continued for more than an hour while more than 600 names were called and diplomas awarded.
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Democracy is an action, not an inevitability.”
For the past six years, the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy has fostered entrepreneurship through the Lowell Milken Institute–Sandler Prize for New Entrepreneurs, a business plan competition exclusively for teams of UCLA students, each of which must include one student from the law school. On April 18, 2022, in an event somewhat reminiscent of Shark Tank at the law school, the final round of six presentations were made in front of a live audience and via Zoom.
Each team, ranging from four to six people, used slide decks to make their presentation, with individual team members speaking about the overall vision, competitive differentiation, key metrics (“total addressable market” was obviously important), funding strategies and timelines and potential legal challenges. The level of thought and rigor was impressive, and the presenters were quite professional, even polished; only an occasional nervous jitter reminded the audience that these were young graduate students rather than seasoned entrepreneurs. Particularly evident was that each team told an effective story, not just about the “what” of their ideas but also the “why” and “how.” It was clear also that these students took the challenge of entrepreneurship seriously.
After a short break for the judges to deliberate, Feuer announced the winners, acknowledging that the decisions were especially difficult this year because “the quality of the presentations—and the ideas for new businesses—were so great”:
• SportSwap received the New Venture Prize for a startup that has not previously won any awards; this was a new award category for the 2022 competition. Daniel Del Giorno JD MBA ’22, Melis Kilic JD MBA ’22, Keaton Lipson MBA ’22 and Justin Moorad MBA ’23 each received $2,500.
The institute’s executive director, Joel Feuer, began the event by introducing the three judges for the 2022 awards: Jenny Leung MBA ’18, program director at Techstars Los Angeles and a member of the winning team for the 2018 LMI-Sandler Prize; Moujan Kazerani ’00, founding partner and general counsel at Bryant Stibel; and Richard Sandler ’73, executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation and a partner at the law firm Maron & Sandler. After Feuer outlined the basic rules—each team had 10 minutes to present and 8 minutes to answer questions from the judges—the evening got underway.
The team Lost Abroad, which is creating an immersive languagelearning experience, went first. Next up was Vesty, a digital incubator designed to facilitate the growth and development of social media influencers’ brands and enable others to invest in the socialmedia marketing arena. The third presenter was OraFay, which is developing a novel microarray drug delivery system, called Sal-patch, for treating gum disease. The fourth team was Vite.st, another medical device startup, which is creating a reusable COVID-19 sensor that is as easy to use as a breathalyzer and delivers test results in five minutes. SportSwap, the fifth team to present, is creating a more transparent and community-oriented approach to online sports betting. The final team, Kommu, is building a home/apartment sharing network to enable people to travel less expensively.
• The LMI-Sandler 2nd place prize went to Lost Abroad. Receiving prizes of $2,000 each were team members Jackson Browning MBA ’22, Siyi Chen MBA ’22, Jack Du MBA ’22, Brent Oberlin MBA ’22, Zi Ye ’22 and Beineng Zhang ’23.
• The 1st place prize went to Kommu: Bo Abrams MBA ’22, Darren Douglas MBA ’22, Branden Nikka ’23, Katie Schiff MBA ’22, Gus Woythaler MBA ’22 and Devin Yaeger ’23, each of whom received $4,000.
The LMI-Sandler competition originated with Lowell Milken ’73 and Richard Sandler ’73 and their desire to provide more opportunities for law students to explore entrepreneurship, venture creation, investment and business development. More than 200 law students have participated in the competition since it began in 2016.
“This year’s finalists exhibited the wide range of creative ventures that have become a hallmark of this competition,” said Sandler, who has served as a final-round judge every year since the competition began. “Each year, participating law students tell me how much they have learned from the competition and express their excitement at working with students from the other professional schools and graduate programs on ventures that have the potential to create change. It is powerful for law students to see the bigger picture of how the skills that they are learning at UCLA Law translate into the world of entrepreneurship.”
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Amber Dean ’23 and Monica Gibbons ’22 are the winners of the 2022 Skye Donald Spirit of Community Award, the highest recognition for student service to UCLA Law. Their award was announced by Bayrex Martí, the assistant dean of student affairs, in a message to the community.
This is the fifth year the law school has presented this award, which recognizes one or more students who demonstrate integrity, generosity, and a focus on the well-being of the law school community. Recipients embody Skye Donald’s values of service and compassion and enhance the UCLA Law experience for the entire community.
Both of the 2022 honorees received many glowing nominations from a broad cross-section of the community, reflecting the sheer number of activities and commitments in which each is engaged.
Dean recently served as a co-chair for the Black Law Students Association, for which she played a leadership role in producing the organization’s annual gala. She is also a member of the school’s top-ranked A. Barry Cappello Trial Team and has competed in numerous high-profile tournaments. In addition to her academic load and extracurricular commitments, Dean externed at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Hearings Unit. She is a past recipient of the Erika J. Glazer Endowed Scholarship at UCLA Law, which supports first-year law students who are dedicated to achieving equity for the Black communities of Los Angeles.
In nominating Dean for the Skye Donald award, her peers noted her public activism as well as her attention to the needs of others. Nominators credited her work with BLSA to ensuring that the organization’s membership was “uplifted, resourced, and happy.” Dean was also held up as an example of a student who inspires and supports others in spite of taking on a multitude of extracurricular activities; her involvement with trial advocacy was cited in this regard.
“I am so thankful for the people who have come before me,” says Dean. “Their hard work and dedication has given me the opportunity to pursue my dreams. I am forever grateful for them because they have inspired me to do whatever is in my power to help others realize their dreams.”
Gibbons recently graduated with a focus in public interest law and Critical Race Studies. She was a discourse editor for Volume 69 of the UCLA Law Review and a staff editor for Volume 68; she was also a research assistant for Professor Jerry Kang. She participated in El Centro Legal’s Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and U-Visa clinic, as well as its Labor and Economic Justice Clinic, working on unemployment insurance at the beginning of the pandemic.
Gibbons’s commitment to the social aspect of law school, as well as her rigorous academic pursuits, led one nominator to say, “Monica allows people to trust her and feel secure in her presence.”
Throughout the pandemic, Gibbons gained a reputation as someone who would take the time to check in on classmates and to help new
Gibbons thinks she’s the one who should be thankful. “My classmates at UCLA created such a warm and supportive community,” she says. “I came into law school expecting to learn a few things and leave; I did not expect that UCLA Law would feel like home. I am really proud of the collaborative community we built together, where we were able to share our wins and losses together and support each other through it. I hope UCLA continues to be a special place for the law students, while also hoping the law school will find ways to better support students in times of crisis.”
Since graduating, Gibbons began clerking for Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr. ’97. Last spring, Judge Mendoza was nominated by President Joseph Biden and confirmed to serve on the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals where Gibbons will continue to clerk for him.
“Every year, it is a pleasure to read the nominations for this award,” says Assistant Dean Martí. “We have so many amazing students do so many amazing things for our community. It speaks to how exceptional Amber and Monica are that they could stand out in that collection of amazing nominees. I congratulate them and all who were nominated, and I thank all who submitted nominations.”
The Skye Donald Spirit of Community Award honors the memory of UCLA Law lecturer Skye Donald, a teacher and lawyer who was admired for bringing out the best in her students and colleagues before she died from cancer in 2016, at age 43. The award and the associated Skye Donald Memorial Fund foster collegiality, compassion and service to enhance the UCLA Law experience for award recipients and the entire community.
students—whether 1Ls, transfers, LL.Ms or M.L.S. students—feel welcomed to the UCLA Law community.Food is an intimate topic set against an international backdrop. Inflation and supply chain disruption affect daily meal planning, while climate change threatens the stability of the entire ecosystem, creating a multinational problem as well as the ultimate “kitchen-table issue.” That may explain why Repast , a new podcast from UCLA Law’s Resnick Center for Food Law & Policy, is engaging a variety of listeners.
Planning for Repast began in late 2020, and the first episode aired Feb. 9, 2021. Co-hosts Michael Roberts, professor from practice and executive director of the Resnick Center, and Diana Winters, the center’s deputy director, wanted to build a pyramid of communication tools to disseminate important research. They’d already created a blog, On Food Law, as well as Twitter and Instagram accounts. Winters, a big fan of podcasts, knew the medium had potential as a teaching tool. Roberts and Winters began reaching out to their colleagues, looking for people who were launching projects or publishing new data.
featured an interview with Jamiah Hargins, the founder of Crop Swap L.A. and the Asante Microfarm. His young organization is transforming urban front yards and unused spaces into healthy food sources for the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Upcoming installments will address equity and supply chain resiliency, including Roberts’s latest research, co-authored with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, on global challenges involving food authenticity and “economically motivated adulteration,” commonly known as food fraud.
Winters says the podcast’s toughest episode covered a groundbreaking lawsuit linking toxic baby foods to neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder. The guests, Michael L. Baum ’85 and Pedram Esfandiary—both of Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman— painted a deeply unsettling picture of regulatory dysfunction and corporate malfeasance but recommended action steps for reform to students and the public.
Achieving balance is an ongoing goal, as Winters and Roberts experiment to find the right combination of guest, subject matter, and audience. They use the easygoing conversational style characteristic of podcasting, occasionally contributing bits of personal knowledge about a guest. Winters’s 13-year-old child, Orchid, composed the theme music. The whole approach is designed to make food law more accessible and to connect with audiences through multiple channels.
“We’ve had several potential students tell us they found the Resnick Center through our blog and want to apply to UCLA Law as a result,” Winters says. “It feels like we’ve reached people who may change their career.”
The Resnick Center is well-positioned to lead discussion in this area, given California’s status as a food producer and a leader in health and environmental policy, and UCLA Law’s rich tradition of collaboration between programs and institutes.
Winters realized the podcast was connecting with audiences beyond academia when a staff member at the Department of Agriculture asked if the hosts would like to have Dr. Sara Bleich as a guest on the show. Bleich is the first person to serve as director of nutrition security and health equity for the department’s Food and Nutrition Service and is leading its work to counter food insecurity and injustice in the United States.
Repast episodes vary from discussions of high-level policy to considerations of on-the-ground impact, such as an episode that
Although it’s a challenge to juggle podcast production in addition to teaching, research, writing, and supervising students, Winters and Roberts believe in the importance of the subject matter and the multiplatform approach.
“For food law and policy to be successful, it has to be interdisciplinary,” Roberts says. “It provides a framework by which we can use different specializations or different points of law to address problems that are seemingly intractable.
“We provide scholarship that helps create a foundation for problem solving,” he adds. “The podcast is a forum where we can articulate and think about these problems and the role of law in addressing them. So it’s not just scholarship for scholarship’s sake. It’s scholarship that can lead to transformative action.”
When critical cases on the U.S. Supreme Court docket are poised to undermine tribal sovereignty—such as this summer’s decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, and the upcoming Brackeen v. Haaland, which threatens to overturn the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act—the need for timely, rigorous scholarship on federal Indian law is more crucial than ever.
Thanks to a five-year, $600,000 gift from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, UCLA Law’s Native Nations Law & Policy Center created the Richard M. Milanovich Fellowship in Law, which was awarded to Alexandra Fay. A recent graduate of Yale Law School, Fay stepped into her new fellowship on Sept. 1, with responsibilities that include leading research projects to develop her own scholarly portfolio, assisting with the Tribal Legal Development Clinic, and coaching the moot court teams of the UCLA Native American Law Student Association.
The Native Nations Law & Policy Center addresses broad public policy concerns in the field of Indigenous rights, while the Tribal Legal Development Clinic aids Native American communities directly through nonlitigation support and guidance. The combination gives students a comprehensive grounding in Indigenous concerns as well as practical lawyering skills.
The fellowship is named for the late Richard M. Milanovich, a revered leader and mentor who served as Agua Caliente’s tribal chairman from 1984 until his death in 2012. During his tenure, federally recognized tribes won groundbreaking legal victories—in particular, the right to operate casinos, thus ensuring economic selfsufficiency for generations to come. Agua Caliente’s ancestral lands encompass what is now known as Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage and Cathedral City, extending into the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains. Milanovich guided implementation of land-use agreements that became a model for tribes elsewhere.
Milanovich was personally committed to education—he went back to school in his 50s to earn a bachelor of science degree in business and management from the University of Redlands. His obituary provided insight into his convictions: “Chairman Milanovich strongly believed that our younger members of the Tribe must understand the battles that were fought and won. Only through understanding our past can we forge a progressive future for our people and the generations to come.”
It was a legal battle that brought Agua Caliente and UCLA School of Law together. In 2020, Lauren van Schilfgaarde, who at the time was the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Tribal Legal Development
Clinic director, needed assistance with a dual taxation policy project. She was aware of Agua Caliente’s litigation on possessory interest taxation and reached out to confer with General Counsel John Plata and his staff. The relationship evolved over the next year, with the tribe eventually becoming a client of the clinic. Students took on realworld issues, from drafting court documents to brain storming ideas to address food and beverage taxation on reservations.
Van Schilfgaarde and John Plata, general counsel for Agua Caliente, describe how this groundwork will benefit both the legal field and Indian country. “Tribes are engaged in law building and lawmaking every single day, and they’re doing it in a complex legal landscape,” van Schilfgaarde says. “There’s a huge need for practitioners that are versed in the complexities of federal Indian law but also in the complexities and increasing nuance of tribal law—building out tribal law that’s going to be responsive to local community need but also applicable in everchanging federal, state, and local sovereign-to-sovereign interactions.”
She points to the Castro-Huerta decision as an example of the Supreme Court’s unfamiliarity with Indian law. “There’s such an ignorance,” she says, “about federal Indian law, about tribes, about the historical position of tribes within American law and the ways in which tribes are engaged with the law today. That is having dire consequences.”
Plata agrees. “It’s not just SCOTUS decisions but decisions at every level of the judiciary,” he says. “Tribal sovereignty—and the very idea that tribes are sovereign governments—is attacked on a daily basis. Protecting the unique status of tribes in the law requires 24/7 vigilance.
“As tribal government and business become more complex and farreaching,” Plata adds, “there is a correlating, exponential increase in the need for more and better trained attorneys. We are starting to see tribes ‘stretch their governmental legs’ and organize business in a way that we never have before.”
Founded in 1998, the Tribal Legal Development Clinic is one of the oldest Indian law clinics in the country, and it and the Native Nations Law & Policy Center offer an unparalleled level of expertise, making UCLA Law a good fit for clients like Agua Caliente. With rapidly increasing demand for legal research in the field, however, it’s unclear whether one fellowship will be enough.
“There’s so much scholarship that needs to be written that there’s an almost over whelming amount of opportunities,” van Schilfgaarde says. “I very much hope that this is just the beginning, the first of many Fellows that we will be able to host and help launch into academia.
“The best protection for tribal sovereignty is education,” she adds. “The more that people are exposed to tribes, Native peoples, and tribal law, the better advocates they are. That puts the onus on places like UCLA to ensure that all law practitioners have a basic awareness of Indian law.”
Tribal sovereignty long predates the U.S. Constitution, but the study of Indian law has historically been overlooked by law schools—until now. A heightened attention to the field is attracting a surge of smart, young advocates who are eager to dive into the work—and they are coming to UCLA Law to do so.
One of the newest is Alexandra Fay, the inaugural Richard M. Milanovich Fellow at UCLA Law’s renowned Native Nations Law & Policy Center, who started her fellowship on Sept. 1. Under the supervision of Angela Riley, professor of law and the center’s director, she will conduct scholarly research, provide support to students, and assist with the overall program.
The Richard M. Milanovich Fellowship in Law was made possible by a five-year, $600,000 gift from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. The goal is to help create a new generation of Indian law scholars and advocates.
Riley and the hiring committee looked for a fellowship candidate with scholarly potential, voracious curiosity, high intellect and a collaborative nature—someone who’d make a good colleague well into the future. Fay met all these criteria and more.
Fay grew up in the Bay Area as the daughter of immigrants. She earned her B.A. from Columbia University in 2018, and then enrolled in Yale Law School.
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Toward the end of her law school years, she took an advanced Indian law seminar. It introduced her to the depth and complexity of the field and sparked an enthusiastic response.
“The field is framed by tribes’ inherent sovereignty. It’s a different way of looking at the United States,” Fay says. “If you want to understand our federal system and American public law generally, reading fundamental, classic Indian law cases is essential. That’s part of our system and it always has been. It’s something that’s been long neglected by law schools—but that’s changing.”
Fay thinks she’ll begin by meshing her past interest in criminal justice with the urgent and real need for tribes to have full criminal jurisdiction over their territory, including the power to prosecute non-Natives. This area of inquiry aligns well with the considerable work Riley has published on the topic as well as the groundbreaking writing on Public Law 280 from UCLA Law’s Carole Goldberg, a distinguished research professor and the Jonathan D. Varat Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita.
As the fall semester began, Riley and Fay were busy setting up meetings with the faculty and peers who will support Fay’s work. “The opportunity showed up a lot faster than I expected,” Fay says. “It’s all brand new and very exciting, and we’re going to figure it out together.”
Speaking at the Manaus conference, Wilson Lima, the governor of Amazonas, Brazil’s largest state, explicitly invited investment. “Come and generate income and opportunity for people who live in the Amazon,” he said. “Our people are hardworking, talented, brave. We want and need everyone’s help to keep the forest standing and keep progressing to improve the lives of our children.”
Deforestation is commonly thought of as a concern for developing economies, but it’s a problem for the United States too, particularly in the Western states. In 2020, for example, the worst fire season on record, more than four million acres burned in California alone—roughly 4% of the state’s land area—and greenhouse gas emissions from those fires were greater than those resulting from California’s power generation.
California, of course, does not have tropical forests, but the state’s climate initiatives represent an important catalyst for the GCF Task Force. “California is the most important example of climate leadership in the world today,” says Boyd. “The state’s clean energy and transportation programs, its efforts to show how forests can be included within climate policy, its assessment of how to leverage programs and finance to reduce emissions from its own forests and land sector—these initiatives help shape how the GCF Task Force’s member states and provinces assess policies and tools that could work for them.”
UCLA’s support of the GCF Task Force is essential to its ongoing evolution and to the successful implementation of jurisdiction-scale strategies that will benefit people, forests and the climate.
“I’m proud of UCLA’s institutional engagement with the global climate crisis, at the law school and the university as a whole,” Boyd says. “The GCF Task Force is another initiative that demonstrates UCLA’s broad commitment to mobilizing research for applied problem solving.”
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That was definitely part of the draw for Branden Nikka ’23: “I was curious about entrepreneurship, and the competition was a great way to scratch that itch.” Nikka and Devin Yaeger ’23 were the law school representatives on team Kommu. “Winning the prize was validating,” says Yaeger. “We were able to test our legal knowledge in a business setting rather than a legal one, and to put our skills to practical use.” Yeager is already a serial entrepreneur. “Before law school,” he says, “I started a fairly successful attorney recruiting company. I’m currently working on a renewable energy startup in Africa that has me really excited!”
“The Lowell Milken Institute–Sandler Prize provides a great opportunity for law students to collaborate with students throughout the UCLA campus,” says Feuer, “including the business school and the engineering school. Law students get real-life, hands-on experience with understanding business opportunities and risks. Learning to think like an entrepreneur and to craft and deliver an effective pitch is invaluable.”
Diana Yen ’22, a member of team Vite.st, agrees. “This opportunity has given me an idea of what it is like to be a lawyer and how much there is that I have to learn,” she says. “The structure of having possible real-life implications to my answers also helped me learn more and gave me a greater appreciation for the business side. And I really appreciated this rare opportunity to get to know students in the other schools and work with them in a simulated real-life environment.”
Despite its resemblance to the opening line in an amateur night comedy set at the bar association, this scenario actually marked a turning point in a collaboration that led to a groundbreaking immigration law center at UCLA Law. (We’ll get back to sushi shortly.)
The Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) was founded in 2020 thanks to a $5 million gift from alumna and UCLA Foundation chair Alicia Miñana de Lovelace and her husband, Rob Lovelace. This gift was followed by an additional $5 million gift from an anonymous donor.
Over the past year, CILP has grown to a team of eight, and in its short history, the center has undertaken initiatives and projects in a manner unlike anything else in academia, the think-tank world, or nonprofit organizations. It has conducted novel research on the role of state and local governments, entered into settlement negotiations in a class action that wound its way to the United States Supreme Court, and engaged in impact litigation at all levels of the U.S. judiciary.
But to understand the ambitious docket of the growing center, it’s important to look back decades to the time an early leader in the field of immigration law began persistently asking, “What’s next?”
When Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and faculty co-director of CILP, began his academic career in immigration law, he recalls that it was an esoteric, niche topic with no dedicated textbook.
“I’ve been one of the oldest people in this field for 30 years,” Motomura says, laughing. “I feel that I was like these people who say they started the internet or something.”
Motomura helped take the relatively limited field into the mainstream in part by co-authoring one of the main immigration law textbooks used in law schools today, as well as authoring two other influential books that have shaped thinking on immigration law in and out of law schools.
“Hiroshi wrote the books…literally,” says Gabriela Domenzain, CILP’s director of communications.
In 2008, Motomura joined the full-time faculty at UCLA Law. He was finishing his second book and had begun thinking strategically about the future of the immigration law program at UCLA. “I realized it’s not just about me writing a book or two,” he recalls. “There needed to be more engagement with immigration law and policy that generated innovative thinking, applied that thinking to cutting-edge issues, and made these efforts integral to legal education at UCLA.”
One of the young lawyers influenced by Motomura’s scholarship was Ahilan Arulanantham, who is now a UCLA Law professor of practice and faculty co-director of CILP with Motomura. He has argued multiple immigration cases before the Supreme Court and various courts of appeals and is recognized widely as one of the nation’s most influential immigration law litigators.
The son of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, Arulanantham was in grade school when the civil war in Sri Lanka displaced many people
Around the time Motomura started at UCLA Law, he met Arulanantham, who had begun working at the ACLU of Southern California in 2004. The two were organizers of and attended an informal occasional gathering of Los Angeles–area immigration lawyers that became known as the Usual Suspects Dinner.
Many of the other Usual Suspects were, like Arulanantham, from nonprofit legal organizations. Arulanantham recalls that Motomura was among the first members of the group from the academic side. “He builds community,” he says of Motomura. “He helped to cement the group and also tie academics into it.”
At Arulanantham’s request, Motomura began giving a one-day crash course on immigration law for summer interns at the ACLU and other area nonprofits. Motomura has continued to teach this seminar every summer.
This is where we return to the sushi restaurant.
After the summer seminars, Arulanantham would take Motomura to lunch “as sort of informal compensation.” Over sushi at a restaurant in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, they talked about what was going well in immigration law and what could be better.
Eventually, the scholar and the practitioner began discussing a big idea.
In 2014, Motomura had finished his second book and was considering the next steps for the UCLA Law immigration program. The school’s immigration clinic had operated up to that point in collaboration with an outside nonprofit organization. By 2017, funding was available for two clinics that would be operated inhouse: one to focus on policy issues and one to focus on direct legal services for immigrants.
Motomura started thinking even bigger: “How do you turn this from the two clinics, faculty scholarship on immigration, plus a lot of student interest and an array of courses… How do you turn it all into a center that creates synergies that amount to something more than the sum of its parts? What does that mean?”
in his extended family. For several years, up to 15 family members and, later, others from the Tamil refugee community, stayed with his parents. As he recalls, “I grew up with displaced people.”
When he was a student at Yale Law School in the late 1990s, Arulanantham read Motomura’s work. Later, he recalls, as a clerk in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Motomura’s scholarship was very influential in a prominent immigration case he worked on. The eventual Supreme Court decision in that case, Zadvydas v. Davis, held that the federal immigration statute does not allow indefinite detention of an immigrant under a pending removal order because that reading would raise serious doubts about the statute’s constitutionality.
Motomura says it was important to combine scholarly work with a practice perspective. Over time, his annual conversations with Arulanantham became more frequent and turned to the subject of what a center for immigration law and policy might look like at UCLA.
Arulanantham had considered helping to launch an immigration center at UCLA Law for a few years, but during the Trump administration it hadn’t seemed like the time to step away from litigation.
The moment finally came in 2020: The law school received the $5 million gift from Miñana de Lovelace, herself a child of immigrants. And after the presidential election, Arulanantham decided the time was right to make the transition to academia.
According to Domenzain, it’s a “magical moment” for immigration law at UCLA.
CILP has been building staff and programs since receiving its second $5 million gift, in late 2020. It has established a group of primary initiatives—“buckets”—that consolidate its mission and guide the projects it will take on.
The buckets comprise substantive work on state and local government, federal reform, systemic racism and transnational migration.
Immigration is often seen as a subject for the federal government. But after more than three decades of federal inaction, CILP is looking at the ways state and local governments can tackle the problems involved.
At the federal level, says Arulanantham, “everything gets sort of sucked into the partisan vortex and then becomes impossible to develop rational policy around. And once it becomes a pawn on the chessboard of the red-blue death match…if anybody does anything in that one area, all the other people have to oppose it. I see one way out of that as devolving power out of the center, giving space for more state and local policy setting.”
For example, CILP’s research recently uncovered that state institutions are not bound by the federal law that prohibits hiring undocumented immigrants. That research has served as the foundation for a campaign headed by undocumented UCLA students that asks the University of California to allow for the hiring of undocumented immigrants. “We have a community of people on our campus who are undocumented and need to work,” says Astghik
Hairapetian, a CILP law fellow, whose research with Arulanantham was central to the campaign, “and we think that there is a strong legal argument that they should be able to work within the university.” Arulanantham calls the work groundbreaking, noting that “we’re starting right here at home.”
Although it can be difficult for the federal government to come to a consensus on immigration, CILP is committed to being a leading voice on such issues nationally. “We’re national players,” says Talia Inlender, CILP’s deputy director. “We have the benefit of being able to influence both new and innovative projects happening at the state and local level while also being involved in trying to seed whatever change is possible at the federal level.”
According to Inlender, these issues include the rights of children in removal proceedings, prolonged detention during and after removal proceedings, and the Temporary Protected Status program, which provides immigration status and work permits for nationals of countries where current conditions make it dangerous or difficult for them to return. For example, Arulanantham is currently representing plaintiffs in Ramos v. Mayorkas, a case challenging the government’s attempt to strip lawful immigration status from nearly half a million immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, the majority of whom have lived in the United States for more than 20 years.
“I’ve come to see that immigration law as a whole, for most of the country’s history, was basically a set of laws designed to curate the racial composition of the United States,” says Arulanantham. This
pillar of CILP’s docket is grounded in research that shows that many immigration laws throughout the United States gave legal expression to racist sentiment, particularly anti-Mexican and anti-Asian.
Motomura says CILP recently completed a report funded by an appropriation in the California State budget at the behest of the legislature’s Asian American & Pacific Islander Caucus. It found that drug laws and laws regarding so-called crimes of “moral turpitude,” conviction of which affects immigration status, were originally based on anti-Asian racism. CILP has also filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court and other federal courts based on its research on such laws.
CILP has begun working across borders to help develop a new set of best practices for regional migration frameworks. According to Inlender, many of today’s laws on refugees and asylum “came out of the ruins of World War II” and do not adequately address modern concerns such as climate migration. CILP is beginning to organize a conference with several universities in Mexico City to discuss the role of Mexico and similarly situated countries that are often transit points for forced migrants from elsewhere.
It was crucial for CILP to have a presence near the U.S.-Mexican border to have direct contact with people affected by immigration laws, and work done by Monika Y. Langarica, a CILP staff attorney, has been essential to the center’s transnational engagement.
Langarica was “born and raised in the borderlands” in Southern California. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, she is the first person in her family to have attended college or law school. Today she works in the border communities near where she grew up. Her role with CILP ranges broadly from direct legal representation to research and impact litigation.
“On some days,” says Langarica, “I’m knee-deep in legal research and writing. Other days, I’m in an ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention center in Imperial, California, or in Tijuana, meeting with clients.” Langarica represents clients in immigration, federal district, and federal appellate courts and has filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
In all these so-called buckets, CILP brings its unique approach, focusing on nontraditional avenues of advocacy and crossdisciplinary work. To support that approach, the first person Motomura and Arulanantham hired onto the center’s staff wasn’t an immigration attorney but a strategic communications professional—Gabriela Domenzain. She has worked extensively as a journalist, served in strategic roles on two presidential campaigns, and led many political and advocacy campaigns. Throughout her career, Domenzain has sought to elevate and center the voices of those directly affected by U.S. immigration policies.
“Whether in politics, media or advocacy,” says Domenzain, “I couldn’t believe how many conversations on the issue of immigration were occurring without considering immigrant voices, much less centering them, and I’ve spent my career trying
to change that.” Domenzain had long been aware of Arulanantham’s work, and when she heard of the opening with CILP, she jumped at the opportunity.
“We consider public awareness and engagement as central to our work and its impact,” Domenzain says. “In other words, media isn’t a tactic, it’s a strategy.” Her previous work in political communications and running media campaigns for litigants in highprofile cases led to her realization that it can be a challenge to amplify the voices of individuals without simply using them to achieve an end. That’s why she is excited about CILP’s holistic and overarching approach to immigration issues. “In the end, and with deep and personal involvement, the people we represent become leaders who challenge immigration policies not only inside the courts but outside as well.”
“Come talk to us,” says Inlender, inviting any student with an interest in immigration issues to engage with CILP. “There are so many ways to be an immigration lawyer.” She notes that CILP faculty and staff can help students see the many ways in which they can direct their interest, including opportunities to participate in cutting-edge research, clinical programs, an expanded array of courses and cross-disciplinary work.
As a student, Astghik Hairapetian was interested in immigration issues but had no experience in the field. That changed when she became Motomura’s research assistant. Hairapetian is interested in the intersection of immigration law, human rights law and international law. Her research with Motomura focused on migration laws in migrants’ destination countries and countries of origin. Today she is on CILP’s staff as a law fellow. The center will continue to provide law students with such opportunities to be involved in research on important immigration issues with leaders in the field.
The two clinics affiliated with CILP—the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic and the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic—offer complementary perspectives. Both were established before the center was created and are now benefiting from the breadth of talent it has brought to the law school. Bringing the groups under one umbrella is part of Motomura’s longstanding vision of institutional cohesion.
Inlender, who co-teaches the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic alongside Motomura, says her own clinic experience when she was in law school shaped her career path. The granddaughter of Polish Jewish refugees who survived a Siberian labor camp, Inlender
grew up with a love of cultures and languages. In law school, she represented a women’s rights activist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in an asylum proceeding, which Inlender’s client won. Another woman who had been in the same prison in the Congo was at the hearing.
“When [my client] was granted asylum,” Inlender says, “they started singing this song that they’d sung across these barbed wires to one another when they were in prison.” At that moment, Inlender says she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She hopes that clinical experience at UCLA Law can be similarly transformative for students.
The Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic generally does not represent clients directly, but it takes on projects that address overarching issues within immigration law and policy. For example, the clinic is spearheading an advocacy campaign in connection with settlement talks arising from the landmark immigrants’ rights class action case Jennings v. Rodriguez.
Represented by Arulanantham, the class members—all of whom were imprisoned by ICE for six months or more without the opportunity to ask a judge for release on bond—argued that they were entitled to periodic bond hearings under the immigration statute and the Constitution. The class won before the district and appellate courts on statutory grounds, after which the government sought Supreme Court review. Arulanantham represented his clients in the Supreme Court, which held that the immigration statute did not entitle class members to periodic bond hearings; the court remanded the case to the lower courts to address the constitutional questions. The Biden administration has begun settlement talks with the class in hopes of establishing a system more clearly defining the scope of ICE authority in such cases.
In the spring semester of 2022, policy clinic students developed materials for a public awareness campaign on issues addressed by the case. “The idea,” says Inlender, “is to use the talks as an opportunity to educate the public on the realities and impacts of ICE detention. The students worked directly with Alex Rodriguez, the lead plaintiff in the litigation, to develop campaign materials including a draft op-ed, talking points, and social media messaging.”
Policy Clinic and the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic—offer complementary perspectives. Both were established before the center was created and are now benefiting from the breadth of talent it has brought to the law school. Bringing the groups under one umbrella is part of Motomura’s longstanding vision of institutional cohesion.
Inlender, who co-teaches the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic alongside Motomura, says her own clinic experience when she was in law school shaped her career path. The granddaughter of Polish Jewish refugees who survived a Siberian labor camp, Inlender grew up with a love of cultures and languages. In law school, she represented a women’s rights activist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in an asylum proceeding, which Inlender’s client won. Another woman who had been in the same prison in the Congo was at the hearing.
“When [my client] was granted asylum,” Inlender says, “they started singing this song that they’d sung across these barbed wires to one another when they were in prison.” At that moment, Inlender says she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She hopes that clinical experience at UCLA Law can be similarly transformative for students.
The Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic generally does not represent clients directly, but it takes on projects that address overarching issues within immigration law and policy. For example, the clinic is spearheading an advocacy campaign in connection with settlement talks arising from the landmark immigrants’ rights class action case Jennings v. Rodriguez.
Represented by Arulanantham, the class members—all of whom were imprisoned by ICE for six months or more without the opportunity to ask a judge for release on bond—argued that they were entitled to periodic bond hearings under the immigration statute and the Constitution. The class won before the district and appellate courts on statutory grounds, after which the government sought Supreme Court review. Arulanantham represented his
clients in the Supreme Court, which held that the immigration statute did not entitle class members to periodic bond hearings; the court remanded the case to the lower courts to address the constitutional questions. The Biden administration has begun settlement talks with the class in hopes of establishing a system more clearly defining the scope of ICE authority in such cases.
In the spring semester of 2022, policy clinic students developed materials for a public awareness campaign on issues addressed by the case. “The idea,” says Inlender, “is to use the talks as an opportunity to educate the public on the realities and impacts of ICE detention. The students worked directly with Alex Rodriguez, the lead plaintiff in the litigation, to develop campaign materials including a draft op-ed, talking points, and social media messaging.”
Complementing the project-based advocacy of the policy clinic, the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic—headed by its director, Nina Rabin, and informally referred to as ImmFam—offers law students the opportunity to acquire experience with direct legal services in a unique school-based legal clinic. In an innovative partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District, ImmFam is located at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, six public schools housed on a single campus serving 4,000 students in the Koreatown/Pico Union neighborhoods. From its office on that campus, ImmFam provides direct legal representation to immigrant students and their families and has succeeded in starting many RFK students on a path to citizenship. ImmFam also provides advice, counseling and outreach on a variety of other legal issues affecting immigrant families in the school community, including housing and workers’ rights.
Students in the two clinics also have opportunities for crossover work, exemplified recently by a report undertaken by the policy clinic on a new expedited immigration docket after ImmFam students noticed a trend of recently arrived immigrant parents coming in for consultations about rapidly approaching hearing dates. [See Sidebar]
CILP often reaches out within the law school and the university at large to study issues that intersect with immigration; students are able to encounter these types of issues in their courses and clinical work. For example, the Criminal Law Clinic, headed by Professor Ingrid Eagly, a leading scholar on the intersection of criminal justice and immigration laws, frequently works with clients who need to navigate both systems, and she produces research that informs CILP’s work. In addition, Domenzain teaches clinic students how to work with the media in support of advocacy efforts.
Professor Nina Rabin’s students in the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, also known as ImmFam, have their ears to the ground.
Each semester, about 15 students work with the clinic, which is embedded in the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus in Los Angeles. When clinic students started to hear from immigrant parents at the schools about immigration hearing dates approaching much sooner than normal, they took note.
The clinic learned that these clients had been channeled into a new, expedited docketing program. According to a May 2021 press release from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the Dedicated Docket was implemented in L.A. and nine other cities and aimed to provide immigration decisions within 300 days, a greatly reduced time period from the years such cases are often pending. “While the goal of this process is to decide cases expeditiously,” the release said, “fairness will not be compromised.”
According to Rabin, in practice the expedited proceedings were leading to serious due process concerns for the families on the Dedicated Docket. For example, a short turnaround between the notice of hearing and the appearance date made it difficult for families to locate and consult with counsel, let alone prepare adequately for a full asylum hearing. In addition, the information provided about the process was limited and confusing, particularly for the asylum-seeking families in the program who do not speak English and are totally unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system.
Rabin recounted one instance in which an individual received a removal order in absentia because he did not appear for his hearing. He had thought the notice of hearing was a notification of his regular check-in date with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the same building. On the hearing date, he had been at the facility for hours and was following erroneous instructions from an ICE officer to remain in the lobby until called.
Shortly after Talia Inlender came on board at UCLA Law as deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy and coteacher for the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic, she and Rabin talked about how the two clinics could work together. Rabin told Inlender about the Dedicated Docket cases, and, says Inlender, “we took that on.”
While the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic continued to provide representation and consultations for RFK families in Dedicated Docket cases, law students in the policy clinic conducted empirical research, direct interviews with affected families at the RFK Community Schools, and courtroom observations.
The result of the collaboration was the first published report by the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Published in May 2022, “The Biden Administration’s Dedicated Docket: Inside Los Angeles’ Accelerated Court Hearings for Families Seeking Asylum” concluded that the Dedicated Docket in L.A. “does not operate consistent with ‘due process and fundamental fairness.’”
Based on the policy clinic’s research, the report stated that 99.1% of the 449 Dedicated Docket cases completed in L.A. as of
February 2022 resulted in removal. Of those cases that ended with a removal decision, 72.4% were issued in absentia, and many of them affected children. The report received widespread attention, including a feature article in the Los Angeles Times
Says Rabin, “On-the-ground information we learned from directly impacted immigrant parents at our school site informed our understanding of a federal policy affecting thousands of families all over the country.”
According to Rabin, the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic is a unique example of community-based lawyering. Thanks to the clinic’s unique site on the campus of the RFK Community Schools, Rabin and the law students are able to learn about and understand policy issues through the development of close and trusting relationships with their immigrant clients and the school community.
With the increased resources of the new Center for Immigration Law and Policy and the platform the center has built, students and faculty are able to respond to current situations through both direct services and policy.
Inlender says, “The kind of synergy between what’s happening on the ground and how you respond both at the individual level but also at a more systemic level—that’s the work I came [to UCLA] to do.”
“On the ground information we learned from directly impacted immigrant parents at our school site informed our understanding of a federal policy affecting thousands of families all over the country.”—Professor Nina Rabin
The Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy (LMI) is celebrating its first full decade of operations—10 years during which the institute has strengthened UCLA Law’s academic standing in the world of business law while guiding hundreds of students toward successful careers in business and tax law. Embracing its ambitious goal of preparing the next generation of leaders in business law, LMI is, without doubt, a critical piece of the fabric of UCLA Law.
The institute’s success is a testament to the generosity and vision of Lowell Milken ’73. “Lowell’s original major gift, in 2011, permitted the law school to found the Institute,” says Joel Feuer, the executive director of LMI, “and he has been extremely generous with strategic funding of its growth and expansion. Of equal importance is Lowell’s vision for LMI’s potential to leverage UCLA’s foundation of education and research in corporate law and entrepreneurship to nurture the next generation of law and
business leaders. Lowell always asks me, ‘How are we making a difference?’ or says, ‘Tell me how we can deepen our impact.’”
“Throughout my career,” says Milken, “I have seen firsthand how the worlds of education, law and business intersect. Leading schools like UCLA Law recognize the reality and importance of that intersection. UCLA’s business law faculty are simultaneously pursuing knowledge to advance the state of the art in corporate and tax law and preparing future generations of practitioners. My hope was that LMI could be effective precisely at that intersection between theory and practice. It is gratifying to see how the institute is evolving to support faculty and students alike.”
LMI is a hub of activity: It helps train law students. It supports legal scholarship. And it brings together the business law community to examine challenging issues facing business in the U.S. and the global economy.
“We have a very broad mandate,” says Professor Andrew Verstein, a faculty codirector of LMI, “but it always comes back to building on the foundation of UCLA Law’s academic prowess. LMI helps to ensure that UCLA Law is part of the larger conversation about law and business. Simultaneously, we strive to give students practical knowledge that supports their successful transition to practice.”
LMI’s most important mission is to help UCLA Law students develop the skills they’ll need to be successful in their first years as attorneys for business clients. Expanding on the law school’s tradition of experiential learning, LMI creates opportunities for students to learn and practice skills that will benefit them in law practice.
As part of a leading research institution, LMI also supports UCLA Law’s business law faculty and their legal scholarship. The institute hosts academic conferences and workshops that bring scholars and practitioners from around the world to the law school to debate the most important business law issues. LMI thus enhances legal scholarship that depends on both the dissemination of ideas and the opportunity to improve (or discard) them.
Moreover, LMI opens the law school’s doors to business law practitioners and business leaders who share their expertise and experience with faculty and students regarding today’s business issues. LMI’s
influence has turned UCLA Law into a recognized venue for the business law community to meet, learn, and debate the challenges facing current and future business.
Eric Zolt, the Michael H. Schill Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, worked closely with former Dean Rachel Moran and Lowell Milken to create LMI and served as the institute’s first faculty director. “The Lowell Milken Institute allowed us to make a really first-rate business program even better,” he says. “The objective from the beginning was to construct a business law curriculum specifically tailored to the needs of our students.”
The bedrock of the UCLA business law education is, of course, the more than 70 business law and tax law courses offered by the faculty. Teaching and research go hand in hand, and LMI supports faculty scholarship in several ways. “The institute devotes considerable energy to making UCLA Law a venue for respected scholars from around the country and the world,” says Verstein. “We host academic conferences and workshops to bring new ideas to the campus—which also builds the UCLA Law brand.”
In 2022, for example, LMI partnered with Bucerius Law School, in Hamburg, Germany—that country’s most prestigious private law school—to hold an academic
conference on current corporate law issues. “This event brought together leading scholars from the United States and Europe to discuss several issues critical to corporate law,” said Professor Sung Hui Kim, one of the event’s organizers. “For example, a key topic was how countries on both continents are viewing recent moves by corporations to address environmental, social and governance concerns. Several academic papers were produced for the workshop, and I have no doubt that several more will be generated as a result of it.”
LMI also cosponsors the annual NYU/ UCLA Law Tax Policy Symposium. Cofounded in 2011 by Professor Zolt, this symposium attracts leading tax law professors and economists to explore major policy issues, such as income and wealth inequality and its impact on the U.S. The symposium alternates between the two host schools, UCLA School of Law and NYU School of Law. Professor Zolt and Professor Kirk Stark, the Barrall Family Professor of Tax Law and Policy, frequently served as chief organizers for the symposium when it took place at UCLA Law.
The 2023 symposium will be hosted by UCLA Law and LMI. Professor Jason Oh, an LMI faculty co-director and the Lowell Milken Chair in Law, Professor Kimberly Clausing, the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy, and Eric M. Zolt, Michael H. Schill Distinguished Professor of Law,
‘‘
LMI provides a wonderful platform for UCLA Law students seeking to maximize their business law experience. It offers guidance for students for course selection and specializations as well as career opportunities after law school. LMI sponsors a wide range of extracurricular programs that nicely complement the business law courses offered by UCLA faculty and distinguished practitioners.’’UCLA
‘‘
LMI has been critical to UCLA Law School’s ability to continue developing one of the best business law faculties in the country. It has funded conferences and workshops on corporate boards, cryptocurrencies, Delaware, insider trading, international corporate governance, securities litigation, and tax. In doing so, LMI has supported the faculty’s research and helped us build valuable connections with other scholars.’’
are leading the planning of this influential event. Professor Clausing has returned to UCLA Law after spending more than a year working as the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis in the U.S. Department of the Treasury and serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy at the beginning of the Biden administration.
Professor Oh says, “We are excited to partner with NYU Law School and the UC Berkeley Department of Economics to organize our 2023 symposium around the topic ‘The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) Five Years Later.’ TCJA was the biggest reform to the tax code in three decades, and this conference will focus on whether TCJA delivered on its tax and economic promises. Five years later, we have the data to take a critical look at what worked and what didn’t. The conference will also consider the most pressing areas for further reform.”
While such conferences and symposia are primarily directed at the law school’s faculty, LMI also brings legal and business
scholars to campus to give students a chance to learn about new scholarship and public policy in tax and corporate law. Examples of courses that feature visiting scholars are Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance and Advanced Topics: Corporate and Securities Law. Opening these learning opportunities expose law students to some of the country’s leading experts, with a focus on current events.
Another particularly relevant course, developed and taught by Professor Zolt and funded by a generous gift from UCLA alum William Kahane ’74 and his wife, Elizabeth Kahane, is Business Strategies and Corporate Governance, a class that features case studies of high-profile companies—Theranos, Uber, Wells Fargo and Enron—to help students understand issues and consequences of strategy and governance. The course requires students to see corporate strategies and challenges from a number of perspectives: those of lawyers, investors, managers and regulators.
LMI also serves law students interested in business through business courses taught at the law school by professors from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, such as Entrepreneurship and Venture Initiation and Accounting and Financial Skills for Lawyers. In addition, LMI has built strong connections with multiple UCLA programs focused on entrepreneurialism, including Startup UCLA, UCLA Anderson’s Price Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s Institute for Technology Advancement.
Says Feuer, “We want law students to understand executive decision making, the larger enterprise perspective, and the entrepreneurial mindset.”
LMI also fosters networking opportunities with students from the Anderson School of Management— “people who might one day be clients of lawyers,” as Feuer puts it. “Successful lawyers are skilled networkers.”
An example of this is LMI’s Global Business and Policy Forum—40 law students and 40 business school students are invited to hear presentations on newsworthy issues of the day. Recent events addressed topics such as the purpose of the corporation, cryptocurrency, and the Paris Accords and climate change. The popular Business Law Breakfasts bring in legal and business leaders to discuss, say, the legal ramifications of self-driving cars or current antitrust challenges.
LMI has also established initiatives designed to give students opportunities to apply their classroom learning and acquire practical skills necessary for success. “We like to call this high-impact learning,” says Feuer. “We give students the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and practice negotiating, drafting, and presenting in the context of solving a business problem.” These co-curricular programs help law
students understand and experience the challenges of business and the lawyer’s role in meeting those challenges through active participation and real student engagement.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of these initiatives are competitions. The increasingly popular Lowell Milken Institute–Sandler Prize for New Entrepreneurs encourages UCLA students to develop new business ventures and compete for cash prizes. Now in its sixth year, the competition brings together teams of four to six UCLA students (at least one must be a law student) to present their ideas for new companies in a highly competitive Shark Tank –style event.
Students learn what entrepreneurship really entails, from conceiving an idea and vision to crafting a business plan, from courting investors to developing a startup.
Richard Sandler ’73, who started the competition with Lowell Milken, says, “It is powerful for law students to see the bigger picture of how the skills they are learning at UCLA Law translate into the world of entrepreneurship.”
LMI’s competitive opportunities also include the Intramural Transactional Law
Competition, which is the final exercise of the Transactional Law Competition course. Sarah Korobkin, LMI’s director of special projects, teaches the course and organizes the competition. After studying a complex transaction, small teams— some students represent the buyer, others the seller—learn to negotiate and draft contracts. The intramural competition, judged by a panel comprising faculty and alumni, is exclusively for UCLA Law students; the Interscholastic Transactional Law Competition pits UCLA Law teams against teams from across the country.
In 2022, 30 teams from 20 law schools competed at UCLA Law.
LMI also supports UCLA Law students and UCLA Anderson students in the annual Holland & Knight JV Challenge, formerly known as the Pircher, Nichols & Meeks Joint Venture Challenge.
The teams must negotiate a real estate transaction designed by that real estate law firm powerhouse. Additionally, the institute sponsors UCLA Law students who participate in the Duberstein Bankruptcy Moot Court Competition and the American College of Bankruptcy Biennial
Law Student Bankruptcy Negotiation Competition (9th Circuit).
“Competitions,” says Feuer, “raise the stakes and ignite a spark in students.”
One particularly practical LMI offering explicitly targets first-year law students— the Program on Professional Development. This program helps them develop prowess in technology and understanding of professional branding, mental wellness, presentation skills and even business etiquette.
In just over a decade, the Lowell Milken Institute has proved integral to the UCLA Law experience for students interested in corporate law and the business world, as well as for the professors who specialize in this critical area of legal education.
“LMI seeks to promote and elevate the educational experiences of our students in business law,” says Professor Oh. “Its impact has been indelible.”
Oh noted that LMI’s success is a testament to “the enthusiastic participation of the UCLA Law business law and tax law faculty in LMI’s programs
‘‘ LMI has done a great job at offering innovative special events and cocurricular programs targeted at business law students. These help students fill in the gaps between our regular business law courses and help keep them attuned to the latest developments; they also provide students with opportunities to network with people working in law, business, or finance and with people in other departments on campus.’’UCLA LAW PROFESSOR STEVEN BANK
Paul Hastings Professor of Business Law
LMI Faculty Director, 2013–2016
and initiatives” and added, “LMI has also greatly benefited from the unwavering support of UCLA Law Deans Rachel Moran, Jennifer Mnookin, and Russell Korobkin.”
That success promises even greater returns ahead. “We are moving into the future with enthusiasm and momentum,” says Feuer. “Business law is a dynamic field, as enterprises continually face new challenges from the marketplace, regulators, and competitors. Lawyers are frequently at the center of those challenges. LMI’s job is to engage its constituencies— law students, faculty, the greater business law community—so they can understand and address these issues. Our work at LMI positions UCLA Law School at the cutting edge of business law and, as a result, is a valuable resource for students, scholars and the business law community.
“To me,” Feuer continues, “the first 10 years of LMI have set a high bar. We will continue to build new programs and develop new strategies to effectively engage in tomorrow’s inevitable changes and challenges.”
A prime example of this development is the recently announced Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits, inspired by Lowell Milken’s interest in the changing dynamics of the nonprofit sector and
encouraged by former Dean Jennifer Mnookin’s vision for UCLA Law as a law school that has a national impact. Led by Jill Horwitz, who serves as faculty director and the David Sanders Professor in Law and Medicine, the program will help prepare a new generation of lawyers to aid their clients with the challenges and opportunities of the nonprofit sector. Professor Horwitz is a leading policy expert in health care reform and a recognized scholar in the area of nonprofits. As an editor and reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations , she led the ALI’s first restatement on this subject.
“Lowell Milken has extended his philanthropic legacy again with the establishment of this initiative, which resides in LMI,” says Feuer. “We are in the midst of an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the aging baby boomer generation to younger generations,” Feuer says. “Nonprofits will be the beneficiaries of this largesse, and the need for trained lawyers is manifest. Moreover, nonprofit leaders need to understand the complexities of tax law and governance.”
“Embracing this opportunity,” says Professor Horwitz, “LMI expects the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits
to develop a national profile for nonprofit law. We intend to become a leading source of scholarship, education and engagement for the nonprofit sector.”
The program is already off to a strong start: Rose Chan Loui has joined as the inaugural director, beginning October 1. Additionally, Professor Horwitz organized the program’s very successful inaugural conference on the “Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations,” which was held earlier this fall. The program will also collaborate with Loyola Law School to host the 26th annual Western Conference on Tax Exempt Organizations, in December 2022. And as a cornerstone of the program, Professor Horwitz developed and will teach a new course, Nonprofit Law and Policy.
“The worlds of law and business have always overlapped, of course,” says Lowell Milken, “but the creation of LMI was driven by my belief that lawyers need practical, hands-on experience of business challenges. The innovation and reach, the scholarship and achievements of this first decade would not have been possible without the institute’s exemplary leadership, faculty and students, and partnerships in academia, business and policy. Together, we look forward to LMI’s continued and significant impact.”
‘‘ LMI events show UCLA law students the myriad of things they can do with a law degree. Through its Lunch and Learn program, LMI introduces students to alumni with exciting careers and provides important networking opportunities. Through its Sandler competition and transactional law meets, the institute teaches students the nondoctrinal skills that a practicing lawyer needs. By supporting academic research, LMI shows how ideas can affect policy and practice. LMI has also been extremely valuable to the business and tax law faculty by providing the resources to throw the very best academic conferences, invite the most important speakers, and collaborate with the premier academic institutions in the world.’’UCLA LAW PROFESSOR JASON OH Lowell Milken Chair in Law
For more than half a century, experiential learning has been a cornerstone of the UCLA Law education. Live-client clinics, for example, provide opportunities for students to get real-world legal experience and help underserved communities. Trial advocacy competitions—mock trials—present another way for law students to get experience, essential experience for litigators and trial lawyers and enormously valuable experience for any kind of lawyer.
“Trial ad is a vital component of legal education, and surprisingly few schools are actively embracing the benefits of mock trial competitions,” says Justin Bernstein, lecturer in law and director of the A. Barry Cappello Program in Trial Advocacy. “Mock trial
is obviously valuable for students who want to try cases. But it is also enormously valuable for students who never plan to set foot in a courtroom. It teaches students to simplify legal concepts for a nonlawyer audience—and to communicate persuasively. It teaches critical thinking and public speaking. It teaches them how to think on their feet and stay calm under pressure. Those skills are crucial for all lawyers. I routinely have students tell me three, five, ten years after school that they use their trial advocacy skills more than any other.”
UCLA Law students have competed in mock trials for many years, but in 2018, famed trial lawyer Barry Cappello ’65, founder of the Santa Barbara–based litigation firm Cappello & Nöel LLP, made a substantial gift to the law school to create a more formal, rigorous, and ambitious program. Under Bernstein’s leadership, UCLA Law has become the team to beat in national mock trial competitions— the undisputed leader in trial advocacy, with benefits for students and the school itself.
For the past four seasons, UCLA Law has been ranked No. 1 in a field of more than 160 law schools by Fordham Law’s Trial Competition Performance Rankings. UCLA Law is not just the best trial team in the country—it is the best by a country mile:
• In 2020–21, UCLA led the nation with 40 points, while the second-place team had 15. In 2021–22, UCLA scored 51 points; the second-place team scored 16.
• In 2020–21, UCLA became the first law school to win the three national championships in the same season: the Tournament of Champions, the National Trial Competition, and the Student Trial Advocacy Competition. In 2021–22, UCLA did it again.
• Since 2018, 31 UCLA Law teams won their events. No other law school has more than 10 winning teams.
• In the 2021–22 season, UCLA Law had two separate winning streaks of at least 20 consecutive trials.
• Every team member in the Class of ’22 competed in a championship round.
“What UCLA Law is doing far exceeds every other school,” says Joe Lester, the director of trial advocacy at University of Georgia School of Law.
Lester runs Trial Team Central, which tracks results from every major competition. “UCLA’s dominance, particularly over the past 18 months, is unprecedented. They have won more in one year than the best programs win in a decade.”
Why is UCLA Law so good at this? Talent, of course, is the raw material. UCLA Law attracts great students, including some who participated in mock trials in high school or college. But Bernstein believes that great advocates are made, not born: “The trial lawyer’s mantra is preparation, preparation, preparation,” he says. “At UCLA, we prepare students to be ready to try cases the day they graduate.”
The UCLA trial team also excels because of its accomplished coaches: Bernstein—the youngest coach ever inducted into the American Mock Trial Coaches Hall of Fame, and recipient of the University’s 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award—and more than a dozen others. Some are award-winning alums, such as J.D. Rees ’14, Bailey Loverin ’19, Kyle DeCamp ’19, Aidan Welsh ’19, Brittnee Bui ’20, and Deeksha Kohli ’20. Some come from the ranks of Bernstein’s former students, such as prosecutor Andy Tran and trial lawyer Rahul Hari. During the pandemic, UCLA Law trial ad teams benefited on Zoom from the expertise of national champion coaches and trial lawyers all over the country, including Ben Wallace, a former United States Supreme Court clerk in Washington, D.C.; Laureen Bousmail, a public defender in San Diego; Amanda Mundell, an appellate attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.; Zach Fields, a clerk for the 9th Circuit in Phoenix; Melissa Watt, a litigator in Cincinnati; and Alex Bluebond, a litigator in Houston. Five UCLA Law coaches have competed at
the prestigious Top Gun national trial competition, and more than a dozen have won championships as coaches or competitors. Adds Bernstein, “There has never been a law school with more national champion coaches at one time.”
Success also takes institutional commitment in the form of financial resources and support from the faculty and administration. For example, the team has received evidentiary advice from Professor Pavel Wonsowicz and advice on criminal procedure from Professor Beth Colgan. “Since receiving the major gift from Barry Cappello,” says Bernstein, “UCLA Law has built a practical, hands-on and immersive approach to teaching trial advocacy.”
Trial advocacy competitions are decidedly not academic exercises. They are as close to real-world situations as possible, with carefully constructed cases complete with witness statements, exhibits, stipulations, and jury instructions. Teams of two to four students prepare their cases for the courtroom, with guidance from coaches.
“Trial advocacy teaches you how to think like a lawyer and informs everything I do in my practice,” says Brittnee Bui ’20, now clerking for a federal judge. “The oral argument skills translate to presentations I make to partners and in court. The critical thinking skills involved in formulating a mock trial strategy inform my pretrial strategies in practice. Because I know how to plan for a trial, I can draw conclusions about how certain pieces of evidence will impact arguments at the motion to dismiss, summary judgment, and trial stages— which in turn informs settlement strategy.”
Trial
is a vital component of
education, and surprisingly few schools are actively embracing the benefits of mock trial competitions.’’
While some students participated in a mock trial in high school or college, most discover it only when they get to UCLA Law. Andrew Gordon ’22 says his team had no mock trial experience at all when they started competing: “We were learning Justin’s approach on the fly; How do we pick dynamic moments for our opening? What’s our approach on cross and on direct?” Gordon’s team competed for four semesters with other students who had no previous experience, and three times they reached the semifinals of national competitions of more than 30 teams. After graduation, Gordon will work as a post-bar clerk in the Orange County DA’s office.
Trial team competitors learn how to perform effectively in the courtroom. “We learned how to make something complex sound elegant, intuitive and persuasive,” says Gordon. “Rhetorical force isn’t enough; you have to really understand the evidence as well.”
Bui says that trial advocacy significantly improved her ability to think on her feet. One event she competed in featured live witnesses. “I didn’t know how the witness would answer my questions and had to be ready to guide someone I met only 15 minutes before the competition,” she recalls. “This helped me learn to be more responsive, to form a narrative primarily through questions rather than answers, and to stay calm in stressful situations.”
“Lots of people have been talking about the growing importance of practical experience with their academic work in law school,” says Rees, now special counsel at Sheppard Mullin in trust and estate litigation, a mock trial competitor when he was at UCLA Law, and a coach. “Learning how to be comfortable and look comfortable when making an argument and applying the law will serve you well through your entire career.”
“Trial advocacy is the best preparation for lawyers interested in litigation or trial careers,” says Bui, “but even for others, these skills are highly transferable and will help build confidence.”
Trials aren’t won by individuals; they’re won by teams. “The most valuable skill I learned is how to work and communicate as part of a team,” says Bui. “I learned how to put aside my style or theories to hear what my teammates had to say, how to be willing to try something their way, and how to be open to learning from my peers.”
“Everyone on UCLA’s team is talented,” says Enrico Trevisani ’22, “but everyone also brings a different style and a different way of doing things. It’s a great way to learn.” Trevisani recently began working in the New York office of Michelman & Robinson.
It’s also a lot of work—competitions typically require 12-hour days and longer, in addition to all the effort required to prepare—but students really enjoy the experience. “Trial ad is an incredibly social experience, and we formed real connections with each other,” says Gordon. “I felt more camaraderie in trial advocacy than in any sports team I’ve ever been on.” Recalls Bui, “We put in effort to have fun at the end of the day because it’s easy for emotions to run high in stressful situations.”
“Competing was a ton of fun,” says Kohli, now a trial lawyer at Hueston Hennigan in Los Angeles (and a trial ad coach herself). “But it has definitely helped me professionally. Colleagues look to me for insight because of my trial ad experience. And being able to communicate persuasively is valuable every day.”
Several students also mentioned how mock trial was hugely beneficial in getting that first job. “Trial ad helps you prep for interviews,” says Gordon, “and it helped me get a job, straight up.” Sometimes trial competitions lead to job opportunities even more directly. “The Monday after we won Tournament of Champions in 2020,” recalls Bernstein, “a judge emailed me with compliments about our students. By Thursday, one of those students had a job offer.”
Trial
is the best preparation for lawyers interested in litigation or trial careers.’’
Mikayla Wasiri ’20, currently an associate at Quinn Emanuel in patent litigation, agrees. “The mock trial program helped me get the job and do the job,” she says. “Knowing, for example, the rules of evidence has given me a leg up over other associates. Joining trial ad was the best decision I’ve ever made.”
For the past two years, most prepping, coaching, and competing were done via Zoom— and the return to real courtrooms posed new challenges for recent competitors. Says Trevisani, “It’s a completely different ball game to try a case in person, to have to read the room and gauge people’s responses.” His team’s first “live” competition was at the Tournament of Champions in Fort Worth, Texas, in April 2022. The championship round was UCLA v. UCLA, in which the team of Trevisani and Regina Campbell ’23 prevailed over Natalie Garson ’22 and Stephen Johnson ’22.
That competition “was magical,” according to Campbell. “Working so hard to get there, competing alongside my best friends, and knowing that regardless of the outcome, we were all going to be champions—it was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I’ll never forget that day!”
“Trial advocacy has become an asset when it comes to recruiting,” says Bernstein. Trevisani is an example of that. He had participated in mock trials during his undergraduate years at the University of Arizona and says, “Trial advocacy was the biggest factor in my decision to come to UCLA Law.”
Rees, who has been an alumni coach for UCLA Law for years, has seen the program transition from a student-run endeavor into something that builds real brand recognition
for UCLA Law. “Trial advocacy has turned into an incredible program, particularly since Justin Bernstein took over,” he says. “It would not be what it is today without his leadership and vision; he prepares the heck out of these students.”
The benefits of trial advocacy are many and obvious: It allows students to gain experience and confidence, to learn to work as a team, and to become more effective in the courtroom as well as as the law office. But the effects reach much further: “This program changes lives,” says Johnson, a trial attorney at Robbins Geller in San Diego after the bar. “Trial ad is a community that’s loving—it’s like a family.” He recalls that when the winner of the UCLA v. UCLA final in the National Trial Competition was announced “all four of us did a big group hug.”
“I missed the UCLA v. UCLA final round,” says Bernstein, “because I flew back to California to officiate at the wedding of a former student. But seeing the video of those four spontaneously hugging is one of the most special and heartwarming moments from 17 years of coaching. It’s the people that make this activity so wonderful.”
Justin Bernstein, the director of UCLA Law’s A. Barry Cappello Program in Trial Advocacy, does more than just administer—he is a mock trial coach himself. “I learned more from Justin than anyone else at UCLA Law,” says Andrew Gordon ’22, who is about to go into criminal law as a post-bar clerk for the Orange County DA’s office. While Bernstein helps coach every courtroom team, he also relies on alumni volunteers—currently 12 are actively
coaching—who devote their time and energy to the challenge of making young lawyers successful in court. Stephen Johnson ’22 says that “this is the best set of coaches ever assembled.”
The ideal coach, according to Bernstein, is not just a good lawyer but also “someone with enthusiasm, real-world experience, and the ability to make our students even better. Before events, coaches help students develop their case theories, drill them on objections, practice sparring on cross-examination,
and answer questions. They also travel with the teams and coach them in competitions.”
The students benefit, of course, but so do the coaches. “It’s just so rewarding to help these students become even more savvy,” says J.D. Rees ’14, “and I’ve learned so much from the students I’ve coached.” Deeksha Kohli ’20, who has coached three teams, including one made up of four women of color who had never participated in mock trial before, says, “I love coaching.”
UCLA School of Law professor Cheryl Harris and lecturer Justin Bernstein were recipients of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2022, the university’s highest recognition for excellence in the classroom.
and a doer—someone who keeps the best interests of her students, colleagues and community at the center, at all times. We are so fortunate to have her in the UCLA Law family, and I am absolutely delighted that the UCLA Academic Senate has given her this welldeserved award.”
Bernstein, the 34th member of the UCLA Law community to earn the accolade, is a renowned authority in trial advocacy; he teaches courses related to trial advocacy and evidence. Bernstein also directs the law school’s A. Barry Cappello Program in Trial Advocacy, which has greatly expanded in opportunities and accomplishments since his arrival at UCLA Law in 2018. The program now consistently ranks in the top 10 of trial advocacy programs nationwide.
Over the course of his career, Bernstein has coached many law school, college, and high school trial ad teams to major championships, and he co-authored the book Championship Mock Trial: The Guide for Participants and Coaches (ABA Book Publishing, 2022).
The UCLA Academic Senate presents the awards annually to members of both the university’s tenure-track faculty and its non–tenure track lecturers and teaching assistants.
Harris, who is the 33rd member of the UCLA Law community to earn this campuswide accolade, teaches courses in constitutional law, civil rights, employment discrimination, critical race theory, and race conscious remedies. In 2018 she received the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, the law school’s top teaching honor.
A leading national voice in civil rights law and critical race theory, Harris joined UCLA Law in 1998 and is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She is a founding faculty member of the law school’s trailblazing Critical Race Studies Program and a widely published scholar. Her 1993 Harvard Law Review article “Whiteness as Property” is a landmark in the field. In 2021 she became the law school’s inaugural vice dean for community, equality and justice.
“In this current moment,” says Harris, “as we confront the intense challenges of the pandemic, ongoing inequality, and torrents of disinformation, teaching has never been more difficult, more meaningful, or more rewarding, and I am deeply appreciative of receiving this honor now.”
“Professor Harris is more than a towering figure in legal scholarship and the academy,” said former law school dean Jennifer L. Mnookin. “She is a towering figure in the careers and lives of untold numbers of students and colleagues, past and present.
“In supporting her for this award,” Mnookin continued, “a great many members of our community emphasized the value that Professor Harris brings to our law school as a listener, a builder
In a message to the UCLA Law community following the announcement of Bernstein’s award, Mnookin highlighted his “uncommon ability to work creatively on behalf of his students and our program.
terrific impact on our community and his students. Many of them have gone on to jobs as litigators in leading law firms and in public interest settings, and they describe their experiential courses and activities with him as key to developing the skills that they need in practice—and, quite simply, as the best moments of their law school experience. He inspires our students to reach their absolute personal best, and so many of them find working with him
“The support that Professor Bernstein received for this award underscored his
a genuinely transformative experience that has shaped their sense of what is possible.”
‘‘
Professor Harris is more than a towering figure in legal scholarship and the academy. She is a towering figure in the careers and lives of untold numbers of students and colleagues, past and present ’’
‘‘
Professor Bernstein inspires our students to reach their absolute personal best, and so many of them find working with him a genuinely transformative experience that that has shaped their sense of what is possible.’’
In two new books published last spring, Devon Carbado, the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and the former associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, continues to share his research and insights on race, justice, and the U.S. legal system.
Carbado’s book Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment was published by the New Press in early April; later the same month Cambridge University Press published Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law, an anthology edited by Carbado, along with Bennett Capers, professor of law and the director of the Center on Race, Law and Justice at Fordham Law School; R. A. Lenhardt, professor of law at Georgetown Law and co-founder of Georgetown’s Racial Justice Institute; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean and Ryan Roth Gallo & Ernest J. Gallo Professor at Boston University School of Law.
Unreasonable, published on the second anniversary of global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law and the U.S. Constitution play in the epidemic of police violence against Black
arrests, and it determines the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people.
“I started thinking about this book for three principal reasons,” recalls Carbado. “One was to push back against a dominant frame of thinking about race and policing—that there are good cops and bad cops. That obscures the structural dimensions of race and policing.
“The second impetus for the book was to explore the idea that the troubling problems of policing are not necessarily unconstitutional. The book tries to lay out the different ways in which the law authorizes various forms of police conduct. And finally, I wanted to talk specifically about the Fourth Amendment, which is implicated in just about every form of policing that is an issue today—things like deadly force, stop-and-frisk, qualified immunity warrants and no-knock warrants. I hope we can begin to see the problem more structurally, to understand that it is a law problem and not simply a bad-cop problem. Then we can think more broadly about what we might do about these important challenges.”
One of Carbado’s UCLA Law colleagues, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law and Promise Institute chair in Human Rights, says that the book “cuts to the heart of the problem of over-policing and police violence in communities of color: the law itself. Unreasonable sets the stage for the most important new front in the battle for Black lives.” As Carbado has said, “Law is a way to make Black lives matter.”
people. Carbado argues that “the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment over the past five decades has allocated enormous power to police officers—the power to surveil, the power to racially profile, the power to stop and frisk, and the power to kill.”
The Fourth Amendment, which protects people against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” has become ground zero for regulating police conduct—more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make
The book has been well received in both the mainstream press and the academy. According to Publishers Weekly, “Enriched by Carbado’s accessible analysis of court rulings and judicious election of case studies, this is a powerful indictment of the criminal justice system.” Here at UCLA, Robin D.G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, calls the book “a breathtaking, compelling journey through constitutional law intended not only to enlighten but to literally save lives.”
Legal scholars also praise the book. “Unreasonable is a searing indictment of race and policing in the United States,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Carbado was
‘‘I hope we can begin to see the problem more structurally, to understand that it is a law problem and not simply a bad-cop problem. Then we can think more broadly about what we might do about these important challenges.’’
—DEVON CARBADO
a guest of Dean Chemerinsky for a discussion of the book in April, sponsored by the Center of Brooklyn History.
Carbado was also one of four editors of Critical Race Judgments, which uses a novel conceit to explore justice: It reimagines Supreme Court decisions through the lens of critical race theory.
“We thought it was important to write a book like this because of distortions that exist about critical race theory,” says Carbado. “People are raising hard questions about the extent to which CRT could be legible as legal doctrine. One of the goals of this book is to push back, quite aggressively, on that particular point.”
A wide range of scholars contributed to the volume, writing about several key Court decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson, Terry v. Ohio, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Loving v. Virginia, Roe v. Wade and many others. Professor Crenshaw contributed a chapter in which she rewrites the case Washington v. Davis.
“We wanted to include cases that were both explicitly about race, such as Loving v. Virginia, and those that were not, such as Lawrence v. Texas,” Carbado notes. “We also wanted to include cases that were racial injustice turning points, as well as those that transcended the experiences of any one racial group. Finally, in assembling the book, we tried to include cases that covered the range of contexts in which race and law intersect, including issues like voting rights, education, the criminal legal system, reproductive autonomy, Indigenous sovereignty and family law.”
Carbado, with Jonathan Feingold, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law, also contributed a rewrite of the Whren v. United States decision to the book. “I decided to write Whren,” he says, “because it is a central case in the canon of constitutional criminal procedure, illustrates one of the ways in which the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Fourth Amendment law sanctions racial profiling, and because it is a majority opinion. The fact that the opinion is unanimous might lead one to conclude that the Court’s hands were tied. But our rewritten Whren opinion concludes otherwise, and it advances a traditional legal argument, grounded in the text of the Fourth Amendment, to do so.”
“Critical Race Judgments could not come at more important moment,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She notes that the book is “both devastating and inspiring—clearly exposing the ruinous jurisprudential path that has led us away from fulfilling the promise of the Civil War amendments and offering a potential path towards a jurisprudence that could still save our fragile republic.”
Carbado and the other editors of the book took part in a symposium about the project at Boston University School of Law; it can be seen on YouTube.
Publishing even one book is an achievement, but to publish two in the same month, much less the same year, is extraordinary— and time consuming. So what does Carbado have planned now that these works are finished and in the hands of the public? “I am working on two other books with colleagues,” he says. “One focuses on race and international law, and the other examines how race is implicated across the law school curriculum.”
UCLA School of Law faculty members Laura E. Gómez, Blake Emerson and Aaron Littman have earned prestigious section awards that are presented during the 2022 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.
The honorees join UCLA Law Distinguished Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was recognized with the Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and to the Law.
Gómez earned the Clyde Ferguson Award from the minority groups section of AALS. A professor who holds the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law and a leading scholar in the intersection of law, politics and inequality, she joined UCLA Law in 1994 and cofounded and has served as the faculty director of the law school’s Critical Race Studies Program. She is the author of many articles and books, including Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press, 2007) and Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (New Press, 2020).
Emerson received the AALS administrative law section’s Emerging Scholar Award. He is an assistant professor at UCLA Law, which he joined in 2018. An authority on administrative law, structural constitutional law, and political theory, he has published widely, including the book The Public’s Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), which offers a history and theory of democracy in the American administrative state.
Littman was honored with the Criminal Justice Junior Scholar Award from the AALS criminal justice section. He received the award on the basis of his article “Free-World Law Behind Bars,” which was featured in the Yale Law Journal Littman is assistant professor of law at UCLA Law, where he focuses on litigation and policy advocacy challenging the actions of police and prison and jail officials. Since joining the law school in 2019 as a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow, he has launched the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and served as deputy director of the COVID Behind Bars Data Project.
In his new book, The Valuation Treadmill: How Securities Fraud Threatens the Integrity of Public Companies (Cambridge University Press, 2022), UCLA School of Law Professor James Park, an expert corporate law and securities regulation, examines the problem of securities fraud from the 1970s to the present. Park began practicing law just a few months after the 2002 passage of the landmark Sarbanes–Oxley Act, “the largest ever regulatory effort to protect investors from securities fraud,” he says. “The Sarbanes–Oxley Act was seen as a corrective to several major corporate and accounting scandals, most notably Enron,” he adds. “But defrauding investors continues to plague public confidence the markets, and in my book I wanted to look at the history of securities fraud to better understand why major public corporations deceive investors.”
Park concludes that securities fraud emerged as a regulatory concern when investor expectations became more intense, causing some public companies to resort to fraud to deliver short-term results. While some frauds are committed by greedy executives for personal gain, others are committed by well-intentioned managers who go too far in managing financial results. Park makes his point by telling the stories of specific cases of securities fraud enforcement over the years, from the notorious Penn Central bankruptcy of 1970 and Enron in 2002 to scandals involving Xerox, Apple, Citigroup and General Electric.
Park shares some of his insights into securities fraud and the legislation designed to curb it.
How did you become interested in securities fraud?
I started working as a lawyer just a few months after Sarbanes–Oxley was passed. I worked for a few years defending companies in securities class actions and SEC enforcement investigations. I then switched sides and joined the Investor Protection Bureau of the New York attorney general’s office. The AG at the time was Eliot Spitzer, who had made his name as the “sheriff of Wall Street.” It felt like every few
James Parkmonths, there was a new major scandal. After Spitzer left to become governor (briefly), I worked with his successor, Andrew Cuomo, before starting my first teaching job.
Why did you decide to write a book on securities fraud?
As a law professor, I started writing about the problems raised when securities regulators raise novel regulatory theories through securities enforcement. That was often a criticism directed against some of Spitzer’s cases, which attempted to reform entire areas of Wall Street, such as stock research. There are a lot of books on individual securities frauds, but no book really compares and contrasts major frauds from different eras. I had a theory about how securities fraud works, and the best way to make my case was through a book.
Can you briefly define the “valuation treadmill” that gives the book its title?
The basic idea should be familiar to any executive of a public company. When you are public, you must continually deliver financial results that meet market projections of your performance. You have to meet investor expectations on a quarterly basis or your stock price can plummet. It’s essentially like a treadmill where you have to keep running just to stay in the same place.
Some companies will deceive investors by creating the impression that their success is continuing when it is not. Here’s an example from the book about a local Los Angeles securities fraud: During the 1970s, the insurance company Equity Funding, which was located near where the Century City Mall is today, needed to increase sales to show a pattern of growth. Equity Funding boosted its revenue figures by creating millions of dollars in fictitious insurance sales contracts. The company’s CEO continued the fraud because he felt that if the company reported flat earnings, its stock price would plummet. When the fraud was discovered, Equity Funding had to file for bankruptcy, and many of its executives went to prison.
You mentioned the Enron scandal, which occurred two decades ago. What is a more recent example of securities fraud?
A little more than a year ago, the SEC filed a major case against the iconic conglomerate General Electric. For decades, GE was seen as a very safe stock, and the company always met its financial projections. In 2017, when the company reported significant losses in its health care and energy businesses, GE lost more market value than the combined value of Enron and WorldCom. But the SEC alleged that those losses weren’t legitimate operating losses; instead, they reflected years of manipulated reporting to meet GE’s revenue and cash flow targets. The fact that a company of GE’s reputation could do this is evidence that securities fraud continues to be a risk for public companies.
Is fraud more or less of a problem in today’s economic environment?
It continues to be an issue. Entrepreneurial companies, for example, face tremendous pressure to demonstrate exponential growth. While the problem has not been as noticeable because the stock market has been strong, I expect that we’ll see many more frauds revealed if the economy continues to weaken.
What should regulators do about the problem of securities fraud?
Part of the point of the book is that statutes like Sarbanes–Oxley, which requires public companies to invest in measures to prevent fraud, are on sound footing. In addition, I argue that disclosure regulation is too focused on past results; what matters more is a company’s future performance. The SEC should do more to ensure transparent disclosures that permit investors to assess a company’s future performance.
What was it like writing the book at UCLA Law?
I could not have written this book without the support of UCLA Law School—it has one of the best corporate and securities law faculties in the country. Our business law center, the Lowell Milken Institute, has helped support a vibrant community of scholars, students and practitioners interested in these issues, including me. And students in several of my seminars over the years have provided valuable feedback on the project.
UCLA Law professor Laura E. Gómez has been named to the scholarly advisory committee of the new Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. The committee will consult on the museum’s plans to preserve, document, display, interpret and promote knowledge of U.S. Latino history, art and culture.
Professor Gómez, who holds the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law and is a founding core faculty member of the law school’s Critical Race Studies Program, is a renowned leader in pathbreaking scholarship promoting social justice. Her 2020 book, Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (New Press), was featured on NPR’s list of the best books of that year. Her 2007 book, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press), was a landmark in the field.
“Latinos are one-fifth of the nation’s population,” says Gómez, “but we remain under-studied and under-covered at institutions such as the Smithsonian, so I am excited to contribute my expertise and passion on Latinx equality and history.”
Gómez is one of three UCLA faculty members appointed to the advisory committee. Leisy Ábrego and Floridalma Boj López, of UCLA’s Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Central American Studies will serve alongside Gómez and 15 other esteemed academics from institutions across the country, including New York University, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Oregon, and Dartmouth College. UCLA is the only school with more than one representative on the committee.
Legislation creating the National Museum of the American Latino at the Smithsonian was passed on December 27, 2020. Jorge Zamanillo, formerly the executive director and chief executive officer of the HistoryMiami Museum, was appointed the new museum’s director, a post he took on in May 2022.
According to the Smithsonian Institution, “The National Museum of the American Latino advances the representation, understanding and appreciation of Latino history and culture in the United States… [and] provides financial resources and collaborates with other museums to expand scholarly research, public programs, digital content, collections and more.”
While ground has yet to be broken on a dedicated site for the museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has been selected to house the Molina Family Latino Gallery; it will serve as the Smithsonian’s first gallery dedicated to the Latino experience.
Laura GómezOver the past few years, law and policy governing health care have been headline news. The many phases of the pandemic and the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, for example, have put a spotlight on issues such as health care access and decision making.
Health law at UCLA is currently experiencing a renaissance, with the addition of a new full-time faculty member and the expansion of scholarship, course offerings, and programming. UCLA Law recently launched its Health Law and Policy Program to bring new and existing health law initiatives under one umbrella.
At the center of this activity are Lindsay Wiley, faculty director, and Professor Jill Horwitz. Horwitz, the David Sanders Professor in Law and Medicine, came to UCLA from the University of Michigan 10 years ago and focuses on quantitative scholarship on health care law and policy. Her work has shed light on issues such as opioid prescribing policies and the effects of hospital ownership. “I am largely a law and policy scholar who specializes in quantitative studies,” says Horwitz, who says she has always been interested in the interaction between private entities and the regulatory state.
Wiley came to UCLA in January 2022 after a decade at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C., where she directed the school’s Health Law and Policy Program. Now teaching her first in-person courses at UCLA, Wiley specializes in public health and access to health care.
Faculty cover a range of issues Horwitz and Wiley are in complete alignment on one point: Health law encompasses a diverse range of issues. According to Horwitz, the two professors’ work is complementary, featuring diverse methods and areas of focus. “We enhance each other’s understanding of critical issues,” she notes. “With Lindsay, UCLA really covers the health law waterfront in a lot of important ways.” Says Wiley, “My vision of health law is [that it is] a pretty big, broadly defined tent.”
The diversity of health law is evident in the breadth of the crossdisciplinary expertise of the faculty and administrators affiliated with the program, which ranges from reproductive rights to veterans’ issues to physician aid in dying. Horwitz notes with pride that the interim dean of UCLA Law, Russell Korobkin, is also a well-known
health law scholar. And both Horwitz and Wiley say they are looking forward to working with the new director of the Health Law and Policy Program, Diana Winters, whose work focuses on food and drug law.
With the new Health Law and Policy Program, Horwitz and Wiley have their sights set on topics from opioid regulations and Covid-19 policy to health care access to reproductive health care and genderaffirming care. The professors’ first joint publication appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2022; “Not Ready for the End Game—Why Ending Federal Covid-19 Emergency Declarations Will Harm Access to Care” discussed the effects of emergency declarations on the health care sector.
Wiley’s expertise brings to the mix additional course offerings. For example, she is teaching a new seminar on health care access. She says the seminar examines issues including the financing of health care and the ownership of the reins on access to various types of health care services.
One of the students attracted to the new health law program was Jacqueline Blatteis, whose path reflects the cross-disciplinary range of the program. As a college student with a pre-med focus, Blatteis volunteered weekly with a homeless outreach program. She was struck by the legal barriers to health care and housing, which led her away from premed to law school.
At UCLA Law, Blatteis became a research assistant for Horwitz.
“I feel lucky that I’ve had many people that I would call mentors in my life, but I’ve never had someone quite like Professor Horwitz,” Blatteis says, noting that Horwitz regularly looks out for opportunities for students. “My parents joke she’s kind of like my third parent. She’s just always, always cheering me on.”
Blatteis says she’s excited to learn from Wiley as well, and is planning to take the professor’s health care access seminar in the spring semester. She’ll be just one among the first of the many UCLA Law students who will benefit from all the Health Law and Policy Program has to offer.
Taking on one of the most urgent issues in American political and legal life, UCLA School of Law Professor Richard Hasen has launched the Safeguarding Democracy Project to focus on ensuring that elections in the U.S. remain free and fair.
Hasen, a renowned election scholar who joined the UCLA Law faculty in July—31 years after earning his law degree here—assembled a diverse set of scholars and election law experts for the project. They are united by the desire to fend off threats to free elections posed by false claims that the last presidential election was stolen and the controversial election audits and legislative proposals that followed.
Project board members include UCLA professors Lynn Vavreck and Adam Winkler, noted election lawyers Ben Ginsburg and Floyd Abrams, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman, retired federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund president Janai Nelson, who is a UCLA Law alumna.
The goal of the project is to promote research, events and advocacy aimed at ensuring election integrity. Hasen answered questions about the project and his return to UCLA.
The advisory board for the project ranges from top UCLA faculty to prominent election law attorneys from both sides of the aisle. What is the shared sensibility that binds this group together?
The advisory board is diverse in every way—prominent liberals, conservatives, civil rights lawyers, political party lawyers, local and state election officials, journalists and leading academics from a variety of disciplines and ideological orientations. If you put these folks in a room and talked about substantive political issues, there would be little consensus. But all members of the board agree with the principle that we should have free and fair elections and that our democracy is currently in crisis thanks to the events surrounding the last presidential election, which almost disrupted the peaceful transition of power. We have come together to look at how we can strengthen democratic institutions, public confidence in elections, and the rule of law. The matter is urgent.
One of the project’s first events will focus on the independent state legislature theory. What is the theory, and why the need for the discussion?
The Supreme Court announced that it will hear a case, Moore v. Harper, this term raising the issue and, as I told The New York Times, this is the “800-pound gorilla” of election cases. The issue is
complex, so let me start with the facts. In the Moore case, North Carolina’s General Assembly drew congressional districts after the last census that heavily favored Republicans. The North Carolina Supreme Court (which has a majority of Democratic-supported judges) threw out the congressional maps, determining that they were a partisan gerrymander that violated the North Carolina Constitution. The General Assembly has now gone to the United States Supreme Court arguing that it alone has the power to draw congressional maps, and the power cannot even be limited by the state Supreme Court.
The argument is based upon Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution which gives each state “legislature” the power to set the rules for running congressional elections, subject to override by Congress setting different rules. The question in Moore is whether the use of the term “legislature” in the U.S. Constitution means the state’s ordinary legislative process or the state’s legislature acting alone. The Supreme Court in the past has understood the term to mean the broader legislative process, but under the “independent state legislature” theory, the state’s legislature could act alone.
If this theory is accepted, it would drastically take away power from state courts to protect voting rights, and let state legislatures engage in actions that could make it harder to vote. We also saw some parties relying on the theory in the 2020 presidential election, trying to use it as an excuse for state legislatures to submit alternative slates of presidential electors to Congress. That raises the risk of election subversion, as I recently wrote about in the Harvard Law Review Forum
It’s unclear exactly what the Supreme Court will do, and we are bringing in leading scholars to discuss what the court can and should do.
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Four influential legal academics and practitioners have joined or will join UCLA Law’s tenured or tenure-track faculty this school year.
Fanna Gamal, whose scholarship taps into a rich background in community lawyering practice, has joined the UCLA School of Law faculty as an assistant professor of law.
Most recently the Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law, Gamal directs the Community Lawyering in Education Clinic and teaches in the law school’s Critical Race Studies Program.
Gamal’s scholarship centers on the areas of education law, criminal law, and public welfare law. Her work examines how the law distributes resources needed for individual and collective well-being. She is the author of the article “Good Girls: Gender-Specific Interventions in Juvenile Court,” which was published in the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law in 2018, and her forthcoming article “The Miseducation of Carceral Reform,” will appear in the UCLA Law Review
Before she came to UCLA Law, Gamal worked in the Youth Defender Clinic at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, California. As an attorney and clinical supervisor, she led a team representing students in juvenile delinquency, special education, and disciplinary proceedings. She also received an Equal Justice Works fellowship and served as a California fellow at New America.
Gamal earned her B.A. from Tufts University and her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was an editor of the California Law Review
Richard Hasen ’91, a renowned election law, campaign finance regulation, and remedies authority, has joined the faculty as a professor of law. Hasen directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, which he founded shortly after he joined the law school’s faculty in July.
Hasen is a distinguished alumnus of UCLA Law, returning to the law school where he earned his J.D. and twice served as a visiting professor. He most recently served as the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine School of Law, where he was a co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. Previously, he was the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and he taught at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Internationally recognized for his work in the field, Hasen focuses his writing on legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies; the author of more than 100 articles, including in the Harvard Law Review and the Stanford Law Review, on issues surrounding election law; and a reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies and an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions
Hasen has been named one of the most influential lawyers in America, and his most recent book, Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It (Yale University Press, 2022), was named one of the best books on disinformation by The New York Times His other award-winning books include The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption (Yale University Press, 2018) and Plutocrats United (Yale University Press, 2016).
A sought-after commentator, Hasen has appeared widely in the media and published op-eds and commentaries in leading publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal , and The Washington Post. He also writes the popular Election Law Blog.
Hasen holds a B.A., with highest honors, from UC Berkeley, and a J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. in political science from UCLA. After graduating from UCLA Law, he clerked for Judge David R. Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as a civil appellate lawyer at Horvitz and Levy.
Aaron Littman, a respected scholar, practitioner, and clinical teacher in the law of incarceration and prisoners’ rights, has joined the UCLA School of Law faculty as an assistant professor of law.
Littman most recently served as a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law. During that time, he developed and led the Appellate Prisoners’ Rights Clinic, in which students briefed and argued the civil rights cases of formerly pro se incarcerated plaintiffs in a federal court of appeals. Since early 2020, he has also been the deputy director of the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project, which collects and analyzes pandemic data from carceral facilities nationwide.
Littman’s scholarship focuses on the sub-constitutional law of incarceration. His most recent article, “Jails, Sheriffs, and Carceral Policymaking,” was published in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2021. His work has also appeared in the Yale Law & Policy Review, he has served as an expert commentator in The New York Times and other leading media outlets, and he has presented testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Before he came to UCLA Law, Littman was a staff attorney in the impact litigation unit of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. He has also worked in the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division and as a fellow at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Littman earned his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. He also received an M.Phil. in criminological research from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale University. He clerked for Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Lauren van Schilfgaarde ’12, whose extensive work in Native American law and policy has quickly made her one of the leaders in the field, will join the UCLA Law faculty in January 2023 as an assistant professor of law.
A member of the Cochiti Pueblo and UCLA Law alumna, van Schilfgaarde is a research fellow at the law school. She recently served as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Tribal Legal Development Clinic Director at UCLA Law, supervising live-client projects concerning tribal governance and justice systems, ethics, cultural resource protection, voting, and child welfare.
Her most recent article, “Using Peacemaking Circles to Indigenize Tribal Child Welfare,” which she co-authored with Brett Lee Shelton, appeared in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law in 2021.
Before joining UCLA Law as an instructor, van Schilfgaarde was the tribal law specialist at the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, a law clerk for the Native American Rights Fund and Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and a public interest fellow at the ACLU of Colorado.
Actively engaged, van Schilfgaarde serves as a board member for the National Native American Bar Association, vice chair of the American Bar Association’s Native American Concerns committee, as a commissioner for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Lawyers Network, and board member of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Child Well-being Program.
She earned her B.A. from Colorado College and J.D. from UCLA Law.
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The project is planning a 2023 symposium called, “Can American Democracy Survive the 2024 Elections?” What is your answer to that question today?
I have never been more concerned about American democracy than I am right now. My concerns began before the 2020 elections, and I convened an earlier conference at UC Irvine, “Can American Democracy Survive the 2020 Elections?” I did not mean the question rhetorically. We convened an ideologically and methodologically diverse group of experts to make recommendations as to how to hold fair elections in 2020, and soon after we convened our first meeting, the world was hit by COVID-19. We spent the next months working on 14 recommendations in law, media, politics and tech contained in what turned out to be an influential report, Fair Elections During a Crisis. Many of the recommendations were followed, like the importance of the news media stressing that early returns did not necessarily reflect what the final vote totals would be. That was important in preserving voter confidence, especially as false claims of voter fraud and irregularities circulated.
The new conference will pick up where the old conference left off. Given the attempts to steal the 2020 election, our democracy is more vulnerable and so new recommendations are in order. The question is what can be done now to have not only free and fair elections, but elections that people can be confident were conducted freely and fairly.
You earned your law degree and doctorate in political science at UCLA and recently joined the faculty after periods at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and UC Irvine. What’s it like to be back home?
I am thrilled to be a Bruin once again. I have had wonderful teaching experiences and great colleagues and students at all the institutions that I have taught. But I believe that UCLA’s faculty and its resources, and particularly the strength of its interdisciplinary work, will help our work with the project to preserve and protect American democracy at this crucial time. On a personal note, I love the UCLA campus and have friends and colleagues at the law school and across the campus.
UCLA Law Professor launches effort to protect the integrity of elections
RICHARD ABEL, EDITOR (WITH OLE HAMMERSLEV, ULRIKE SCHULTZ & HILARY SOMMERLAD)
Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies, vol. 2: Comparisons and Theories
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2022
The period since 1988 has seen an acceleration and intensification of the global socio-economic, cultural and political developments that in the 1980s were challenging traditional professional forms. This anthology, which deepens the insights in volume 1, presents an invaluable collection of essays by eminent scholars from a wide variety of disciplines on the main issues currently confronting legal professions across the world.
Abel is the Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor
KHALED M. ABOU EL FADL
The Prophet’s Pulpit: Commentaries on the State of Islam Usuli Press, 2022
In this collection of twenty-two Islamic sermons, Khaled Abou El Fadl delivers incisive commentaries on the current state of Islam and the Muslim world from the symbolic pulpit of the Prophet of Islam. Part Qur’anic exegesis and part socio-ethical commentary, this volume showcases the knowledge, enlightenment, and dedication to justice that once propelled the Islamic civilization to great heights of human achievement.
Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law
MARIO BIAGIOLI, EDITOR (WITH MADHAVI SUNDER)
Academic Brands: Distinction in Global Higher Education
Cambridge University Press, 2022
More than just a sign of corporatization and privatization, academic brands provide a unique window on the university’s concerns and struggles with conveying ‘excellence’ and reputation in a competitive landscape organized by rankings, while also capitalizing on its brand to generate revenue when state support dwindles. The first comprehensive analysis of the emergence of academic brands, this book explores how the modern university is being transformed in an increasingly global economy of higher education where luxury is replacing access.
Biagioli is Distinguished Professor of Law and Communication.
DEVON W. CARBADO
Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment The New Press, 2022
Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Unreasonable is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law—and the U.S. Constitution—play in the epidemic of police violence against Black people. In this crucially timely book, Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct—more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process.
Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law
Cambridge University Press, 2022
By re-writing U.S. Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, Critical Race Judgments demonstrates that it’s possible to be judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration.
Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law.
Global Pro Bono: Causes, Context, and Contestation
Cambridge University Press, 2022
The principle and practice of pro bono, or volunteer legal services for the poor and other marginalized groups, is an increasingly important feature of justice systems around the world. Covering the spread of pro bono across five continents, this book provides a unique data set permitting the first-ever comparative analysis of pro bono’s growing role in the access to justice movement.
Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics.
The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy Harvard University Press, 2022
Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as the authors show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.
Fishkin is Professor of Law.
LAURA E. GÓMEZInventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism The New Press, 2020 & 2022
Who are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this book, Gómez argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of antiLatino racism.
Gómez is the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law.
RICHARD L. HASENCheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It Yale University Press, 2022
What can be done consistent with the First Amendment to ensure that American voters can make informed election decisions and hold free elections amid a flood of virally spread disinformation and the collapse of local news reporting? With piercing insight into the current debates over free speech, censorship, and Big Tech’s responsibilities, Hasen proposes legal and social measures to restore Americans’ access to reliable information on which democracy depends.
Hasen is Professor of Law and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project.
Politics and International Law: Making, Breaking, and Upholding Global Rules Cambridge University Press, 2022
International law shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. It affects the food we eat, the products we buy, the rights we hold, and the wars we fight. Yet international law is often believed to be the exclusive domain of well-heeled professionals with years of legal training. This book uses clear, accessible writing and contemporary political examples to explain where international law comes from, how actors decide whether to follow international law, and how international law is upheld using legal and political tools.
Johns is Associate Professor of Political Science and Law.
The Valuation Treadmill: How Securities Fraud Threatens the Integrity of Public Companies Cambridge University Press, 2022
Public companies now face constant pressure to meet investor expectations. A company must continually deliver strong short-term performance every quarter to maintain its stock price. This valuation treadmill creates incentives for corporations to deceive investors. Published more than twenty years after the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires all public companies to invest in measures to ensure the accuracy of their disclosures, The Valuation Treadmill shows how securities fraud became a major regulatory concern.
Park is Professor of Law.
The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire Oxford University Press, 2022
A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten. In this wide-ranging political biography of diplomat, Nobel prize winner, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history.
Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations.
The scholarly interests of Assistant Professor of Law LaToya Baldwin Clark focus on the legal issues surrounding the relationship between education, family and property—and how racial inequality plays a significant role in structuring access to public goods. “It’s quite clear that systemic racism is a key structural component of many forms of inequality,” she says. “School financing based on property taxes, for example, leads to very different outcomes for children across school districts, and these inequalities typically manifest themselves along the lines of race and class inequality in property.”
Not surprisingly, Critical Race Theory is a central part of her vision and approach to the law. Baldwin Clark will teach the law school’s Critical Race Theory course (starting in spring 2023), and she’s one of the leaders of the CRT Forward Tracking Project, a key part of UCLA Law’s response to the nationwide attack on CRT. The project identifies, tracks and analyzes anti-CRT actions at the local, state and federal levels. “CRT is not just an obscure legal theory,” she says. “It’s important to the challenge of making American society more just and more equitable. We have to continue to make the case for CRT at the local, state and national levels.”
And that’s exactly what the CRT Forward Tracking Project has done since it was created in 2021. “We have documented hundreds of examples of actions taken to restrict access to truthful information about race and the impact of systemic racism,” Baldwin Clark says. “This includes legislative actions and nonlegislative ones, like state-level regulation, school board mandates, executive directives and opinions from attorneys general.”
To date, more than 500 instances of anti-CRT activity have been identified, tracked, and analyzed by the project; they’re collected and displayed on an interactive map as well as in table format. But the project also seeks to help activists at every level, by collecting and disseminating information to counter anti-CRT movements. “We have to fight at the local level, particularly against school boards who are taking anti-CRT stands,” says Baldwin Clark. “Our data allows local advocates to develop strategies about how to respond and to give parents and other interested parties a way to make their voices heard.”
She adds, “The Right is mobilizing parents as watchdogs. We need to be able to fight back.”
In “The Law of Pseudonymous Litigation” (UC Hastings Law Journal , volume 75, no. 5), UCLA Law’s Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law, explores in detail the challenges involved in judicial transparency and secrecy. “It’s taken for granted in American law that court proceedings are open,” he says, “but many are not, such as juvenile cases, grand jury testimonies, and many internal government cases. Sometimes there are good reasons to use pseudonyms and to seal cases, but there are no clear-cut rules about how, when and even why these tools are used.”
Volokh says that those who care about free speech and freedom of information, as well as those interested in privacy and civil procedure, should pay more attention to sealing and pseudonymity. “There should be more clarity around the issue of transparency,” he says, “so that people know what’s allowed and what’s not. A plaintiff may reasonably and justifiably not want to be named in what might be an embarrassing case, but the defendant will also have good reasons not to be named— and yet the public and the media have good reasons to want to learn more about the case, which often can’t be done without knowing who the parties are. How do we balance concerns like these?”
The problem, Volokh says, has become more challenging in the internet era. “Open court records used to mean that someone who really wanted to access them could find them in some courthouse basement,” he says. “But now a simple Google search can find cases in which a person has been involved, including various embarrassing and unproven allegations.”
The aim of his recent article, Volokh says, “is to try to push these questions…to their rightful place in our discussions about civil procedure.” The article lays out the practical and philosophical issues surrounding pseudonymity, including the value to the public, to opposing parties and to the court system of greater transparency— media interest can bring significant cases to light, for example—as well as the justifications for less transparency, including fear of retaliation, the protection of minors, and the risk of damaging reputations.
Volokh, who has litigated dozens of cases involving sealing and pseudonymity, usually working with law students, says, “These cases offer a good opportunity to work with students and give them a chance to make arguments in real court cases—sometimes even oral arguments, which students rarely get to do. It’s a great opportunity for them to get involved in a hands-on way.”
LaToya Baldwin Clark
A record number of UCLA School of Law faculty members have been recognized as leaders in legal scholarship based on the impact of their research and writing.
The rankings of scholarly impact are tabulated and published by University of Chicago Law School professor Brian Leiter. He derives his rankings from data, including citations of work by tenured faculty members at law schools nationwide, compiled every three years by Gregory Sisk, at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. The latest data set covers the years 2016–2020.
Leiter ranks entire law school faculties by their collective scholarly impact, and he compiles 26 lists of individual professors’ impacts within their areas of legal specialty. These are the UCLA Law faculty members who were among the most-cited scholars in their fields of expertise:
● Stephen Bainbridge, Corporate & Securities Law
● Stuart Banner, Legal History
● Devon Carbado, Criminal Law & Procedure and Critical Theories
● Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Theories
● Scott Cummings, Legal Ethics
● Ingrid Eagly, Immigration Law
● Cheryl Harris, Critical Theories
● Richard Hasen, Election Law
● Jerry Kang, Critical Theories
● Russell Korobkin, Law & Economics
● Lynn LoPucki, Commercial Law
● Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Law
● Kal Raustiala, International Law & Security
● Seana Shiffrin, Law and Philosophy
● Eugene Volokh, Constitutional Law
Across all disciplines, the 10 most-cited UCLA Law professors were Bainbridge, Carbado, Crenshaw, Eagly, Kang, Korobkin, Motomura, Raustiala, Volokh, and Adam Winkler.
Released in 2021, the triennial Sisk-Leiter rankings place the whole of the UCLA Law faculty at No. 11 on the list of law schools with the highest scholarly impact, and at No. 10 on the list of schools’ median scholarly impact. UCLA Law is also one of the only schools to enjoy a ranking of its scholarly impact that is well above its placement in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking of the nation’s best law schools.
Kimberly Clausing, UCLA Law’s Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy, has returned to the law school after serving in the Biden administration as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of the Treasury, where she led the Office of Tax Analysis for more than a year.
“I worked with an incredible team at Treasury and the White House,” she says, “to formulate the administration’s top tax priorities as part of the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. These plans were the foundation of the president’s first budget and formed the groundwork of the Build Back Better legislation that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2021.”
Clausing acknowledges that “the ultimate fate of many of these proposals remains unclear”—although the Senate passed a revision of Build Back Better in August 2022. But she says that these “tax proposals showed a path forward that would serve essential policy priorities:
raising revenue, building a fairer and more efficient tax system, reducing child poverty and mitigating climate change.”
Back at the law school, Clausing will be teaching Introduction to Federal Income Taxation and U.S. International Taxation and will continue to research the problems surrounding international policy spillovers. “For example,” she says, “countries’ tax policies affect each other, and there are gains for both governments and citizens when they find better means of cooperating and coordinating. One example is the agreement on a minimum level of tax for mobile multinational corporations.”
Clausing’s longstanding research on international taxation was critical to her work in Washington. “The initiatives I worked on included corporate and international tax reforms that complemented the international tax agreement [concluded in the fall of 2021] that was negotiated at the same time,” she says. “That agreement was an important step forward for international tax cooperation.” Clausing believes that such international cooperation will be central to addressing climate change and other problems demanding collective action.
Kimberly ClausingSARAH ANDRÉ will teach Legal Research and Writing. André most recently served as a partner at Nixon Peabody LLC in the Los Angeles office. She holds a J.D. from University of Virginia Law School and a B.A. from North Park College in history and international relations.
JESSICA BARIL will teach Legal Research and Writing. Baril most recently served as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson in the Los Angeles office. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.A. from UCLA in urban education, and a B.A. from University of Pennsylvania.
GERLONI COTTON will teach Legal Research and Writing. Cotton most recently served as a trial attorney for the Federal Defenders of San Diego. She holds a J.D. from UCLA School of Law and a B.A. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in women’s studies.
EDWARD HAN will teach Legal Research and Writing. He most recently served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California and District of New Mexico. He holds a J.D. from New York University and a B.A. from University of Pennsylvania in international relations and communications.
KERRY O’NEILL will teach Deposition Skills and Advanced Evidence Objections and Arguments. O’Neill most recently served as UCLA Law’s inaugural director of judicial clerkships. She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a B.A. from Princeton University in history with a concentration in East Asian studies.
Nikita Aggarwal’s research focuses on the evolving relationship between consumer credit markets, technological innovation, and distributive justice. Before coming to UCLA, she was a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
Aggarwal earned her B.A. in law (LL.B., first class honours) at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is completing a Ph.D. in law at the University of Oxford.
Thomas Byrne’s research lies at the intersection of moral theory, legal theory and metaphysics.
Byrne earned his B.A and MPhil. Stud., both in philosophy, at King’s College London and his Ph.D in philosophy from MIT.
Richard M. Milanovich Fellow, Native Nations Law & Policy Center
Alexandra Fay’s primary research interests concern criminal justice in Indian country, tribal co-management, food sovereignty, and water rights. In all her projects, she relies on critical methods drawn from critical race theory and political ecology.
She earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Columbia University and her J.D. from Yale Law School.
Emmett/Frankel
Gabriel Greif earned his B.A. in business economics magna cum laude from UC Riverside. He earned his J.D. from UCLA School of Law with a specialization in environmental law. During law school, Greif was a summer law clerk with Mental Health Advocacy Services and Los Angeles Waterkeeper and was a legal extern at Earthjustice. He also served as editor-inchief of the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy.
Duncan McLaren’s research lies in climate politics and governance, especially with respect to geoengineering technologies and interventions. He previously worked as a Research Fellow at Lancaster University (UK) focusing on the security politics of climate engineering, and on governance of net-zero and the role of carbon removal techniques.
McLaren earned his B.A. in geography from Cambridge University (UK), and also holds master’s degrees in environmental policy (University of London) and business administration (Cambridge).
Courtney Radsch, Ph.D., is a journalist, scholar, and free expression advocate who writes and speaks about the nexus of technology, media, and policy research. Her work is informed by a commitment to human rights and ensuring the sustainability of independent media.
Radsch earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, M.S. from Georgetown University and Ph.D. in international relations from American University.
Vishnu Sridharan’s research is currently focused on the surveillance, policing, and incarceration of low-income communities and communities of color. He previously worked for a number of nonprofits including Californians for Safety and Justice, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, and Race Forward.
Sridharan earned his B.A. cum laude from Columbia College, his J.D. from Stanford Law School, and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.
Critical Race Studies (CRS) welcomed four new staff members to the program this year. Taifha Alexander, CRT Forward project director, and Alicia Hawkins, CRS communications specialist, joined the program in January. Alexander earned her J.D. from Georgetown Law in 2017 and her LL.M. with a CRS specialization from UCLA Law in 2021. She has a background in building coalitions that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education, and the CRT
Forward Tracking Project was launched, and continues to expand, under her leadership.
Hawkins is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. She studied documentary film at the University of Washington and earned an M.F.A. from Temple University in Film and Media Arts. Hawkins brings her experience in producing media content for nonprofits and educational institutions to this new role.
In addition, Ayda Haghighatgoo, program coordinator, and Kyle Reinhard ’21, CRT Forward postgraduate fellow, joined CRS in the summer. Haghighatgoo, a longtime CRS and Promise Institute volunteer, has extensive experience in project and events management with the J. Paul Getty Trust. She is also a UCLA political science alumna and holds a paralegal studies certificate from the University of California, Berkeley.
Reinhard is a CRS alumnus. During law school, he was a summer associate at Bush Gottlieb, a union-side labor law firm, and a research assistant for CRS professor Sunita Patel. Before joining CRS, he was a post-bar fellow at the Eviction Defense Network in Los Angeles.
CRS executive director Jasleen Kohli, who recently celebrated her 10th year heading the program, says, “I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to add such talented new team members, who bring not only a rich set of skills and backgrounds but also genuine passion and enthusiasm for the work of the program.”
Launched in 2000, Critical Race Studies was the first law school program dedicated to incorporating critical race theory (CRT) into legal scholarship and teaching. More than two decades later, the program remains unparalleled in legal education and continues to be one of the most popular specializations for students. Class sizes have steadily risen, more than doubling over the past 10 years. The program has seen unprecedented growth more recently, with 115 J.D.s in the class of 2024, up from the previous record held by the class of 2022, with 88 students. UCLA Law class sizes generally
hover around 320–350, meaning a quarter to a third of UCLA students now choose the CRS specialization.
Like many applicants, Danielle Garcia, a CRS 2L and master’s of public policy student, was drawn to the program when searching for a law school education that would address structural inequality. Before she came to UCLA, Garcia’s professional experience in direct service, policy, strategic planning and governance on issues of housing and homelessness made her acutely aware of the skill set and tools she would require to increase her impact as an advocate.
“I wanted a program that addressed the racial injustice of this country’s history, systems and policies and how they continue to play out,” Garcia says. “The focus on social justice that CRS offers is what brings me here today.”
The reputation of the CRS faculty, some of the most renowned scholars in the field, also attracts many students to the program. Nicole Powell was introduced to the scholarship of CRS co-founders and faculty members Cheryl Harris and Kimberlé Crenshaw while earning a master’s in African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School and was eager to learn from these leading CRT scholars. Later, as a CRS student, Powell was mentored by Harris and notes that Harris’s Civil Rights class was one of her most transformative law school experiences. “It is powerful,” she says, “to go through the cases [Harris] does and learn how intrinsic race is in the legal system and how it impacts your experiences in the present day and your family’s experiences. How can you not have CRS in a law school environment? It’s just so intrinsic to the law.”
Like Powell, 3L Paton Moody also found reflections of his own experiences in the CRS program. Moody, the former copresident of UCLA’s Native American Law Student Association and co-chair of El Centro’s Let’s Go! Liberation Clinic, found the knowledge imparted in CRS invaluable for both contextualizing his Indigenous heritage and history and gaining an informed perspective on contemporary race issues: “I think it gives people, not just Indigenous people, the tools to really understand the history of race in the United States, their own experiences, and the current moment we are in.” The unique curricular focus of CRS resonates with a diverse and vibrant student body and attracts those from communities traditionally underrepresented in legal academic fields.
Whether through its clinics, programming, or curriculum, CRS strives to provide students with the training, skills and resources they need to be the next generation of racial justice advocates and scholars.
UCLA Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights has been preparing students to meet human rights challenges through robust legal training coupled with training in innovative, crossdisciplinary skills.
In the 2022 January term, students participated in a two-week intensive class: The Human Rights Challenge. Something of a maverick in the UCLA Law course catalog, this class instructs students in the application of human-centered design, systems thinking, network building and other techniques from outside traditional legal pedagogy to help them reimagine legal responses to real-world challenges.
Students participating in this year’s challenge were asked to address the problem of global wildfires through a human rights lens, which led to strategies based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, migrant workers’ rights and negligence on the part of various jurisdictions.
Another special offering was Lecturer in Law Danny Vannucchi’s Strategies for Successful Human Rights Advocacy course. As the former deputy director of global strategy and impact for Amnesty International, Vannucchi led students through the psychology of change making, training them to conceptualize and implement advocacy strategies to have real impact.
Los Angeles County is home to more Indigenous -language communities than any other county in the nation, yet the number of languages and the number of people that speak them remained unclear. Officials had presumed that Indigenous
speakers also spoke Spanish, which is often not the case. The Promise Institute partnered with the Indigenous women–led organization CIELO, the Bunche Center and the American Indian Studies Center to produce an online map of LA County’s Indigenous language communities, opening access to essential services and public health for these marginalized groups.
Promise Institute students used cutting-edge open-source investigative techniques to identify disinformation and hate speech online and produced the report “Social Media, Content Moderation and International Human Rights Law: The Example of the Nagorno-Karabakh/ Artsakh Conflict.”
Law students Aya Dardari, Nick Levsen and Ani Setian analyzed posts made around the time of the Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh conflict in fall 2020 on four social media platforms to see the content the platforms left up, what they should have taken down, and whether they managed to balance the right to freedom of expression with the prohibition on hate speech under international human rights law.
Promise Assistant Director Jess Peake, who worked with the students, says, “The examples expose broader challenges of content moderation by platforms—which is all the more critical during an armed conflict, where online speech may influence conflict dynamics and even cost lives.”
As social media companies continue to debate their responsibility regarding content moderation, the Promise Institute argues, based on the findings of this report, that international human rights law standards provide a crucial guide to preventing hate speech while upholding freedom of expression.
This year, Professor Anna Spain Bradley was elected to a second term as vice president of the American Society of International Law (ASIL). She joins a long line of UCLA’s ICLP faculty who have held leadership positions for the organization, and she will be working with ICLP Director Jess Peake to broaden the society’s outreach through its Public Engagement Committee, of which Peake is a member.
Twenty junior and senior scholars attended the Southern California International Law Scholars Workshop, and with the waning of the pandemic, it served as a reunion as well as an academic gathering.
Richard H. Steinberg, ICLP faculty member and professor, edited an essential volume of classic articles, International Trade Law, published as a Harvard Law School H2O Open Source Casebook. Professor Anna Spain Bradley’s book examining the inseparable role of cognitive processing in jurisprudence, Human Choice in International Law, was published by Cambridge University Press.
ICLP funded travel expenses for seven students to attend the ASIL Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in April. While there, the students attended programming on “Personalizing International Law,” networked with professionals in the field, and attended a joint ICLP/Promise Institute reception for the many alumni in the D.C. area.
With Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law, and Ahilan Arulanantham, a leading immigrants rights’ litigator and professor
“It’s one thing to read about Alex Rodriguez in casebooks that include Jennings v. Rodriguez,” says CILP faculty co-director Arulanantham, “but another to watch him
including 150 children, were ordered removed without ever seeing a judge. The resulting report has already served as an essential advocacy tool at the national level.
from practice, at its helm, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) has continued to expand in size, scope and impact as it enters its second year at UCLA Law.
CILP doubled in size, offered its first Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic, drew national audiences to difficult conversations on urgent issues facing the immigrants’ rights movement and graduated its inaugural class of law student fellows.
“I’m thrilled with the impact we’re having and the opportunities we’re providing UCLA Law students in immigration law and policy,” says CILP faculty co-director Motomura. “And as the Carpenters sang, “We’ve only just begun.”
This year, CILP has generated first-of-its kind research, challenged anti-immigrant and racist laws in the courts and unearthed evidence of anti-Asian racism behind laws that are still on the books today. They’ve done this, and more, not only through innovative legal reasoning and research, but by introducing the real people impacted by our immigration laws to their students and audience.
live, talking about being in immigration prison for three and a half years without the opportunity to see a judge and ask for his release. Learning from those we represent, firsthand, is key to our work.”
CILP Deputy Director Talia Inlender, who co-taught the center’s inaugural Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic, worked with students to produce a report on the Biden administration’s Dedicated Dockets, a policy to fast-track court proceedings for families seeking asylum. Their research revealed that 99.1% of completed cases on Los Angeles’ Dedicated Docket resulted in deportation for those seeking asylum; most of them,
Says Inlender, “Students observed immigration court hearings, talked directly with families and legal service providers about their experiences, and played a critical role in analyzing the data that exposed the gross miscarriages of justice on the Los Angeles Dedicated Docket.”
“CILP is not only helping to expand UCLA Law’s role as a national leader in immigration law but is having real impact outside of academia,” says Gabriela Domenzain, CILP’s communications director. “We’re adding new ideas and voices to conversations about immigration law and immigrants’ rights, and we’re very proud of that.”
“ I’m thrilled with the impact we’re having and the opportunities we’re providing UCLA Law students in immigration law and policy. We’ve only just begun.”
—HIROSHI MOTOMURA, CILP FACULTY CO-DIRECTORHiroshi Motomura
In the coming year, the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy (ITLP) expects to launch a new Information Policy Lab for law students and to offer a tech policy class for engineers. The institute will also host programs on information integrity and the platformization of journalism, AI governance, quantum research policy and new ways to understand privacy. These offerings, as well as its continuing research, will allow ITLP to contribute to the public discourse on the intersection of law and technology and provide new opportunities for students.
In November 2021, ITLP, in partnership with the nonprofit journalism organization Rest of World, introduced the essay series The Destabilization Experiment, which examines the ways in which social media has affected democracies around the world. The series, featuring authors from Canada, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Sudan, Palestine and South Africa, is available online at https://restofworld.org/series/the-destabilization-experiment/.
ITLP faculty and staff authored 10 law review articles and contributed articles to Newsweek, Tech Policy Press, Slate, Brookings, Barron’s, and La Nación (Argentina’s newspaper of record); they also provided commentary to NBC News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Al Jazeera
In line with the institute’s mandate to produce high-quality research on law and technology, ITLP’s first institutional publications were launched this year—a submission to the FDA on regulating the use of AI in medical devices, a submission to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the use of technology to counter violent extremism, and an analysis of Pakistan’s social media rules, the latter of which supported a successful constitutional challenge in that country.
Over the course of the 2021–2022 year, the Institute for Technology Law & Policy hosted 34 events featuring many of America’s foremost scholars, such as Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Mark Lemley from Stanford Law School. These speakers were joined by leading faculty from across UCLA, including Sarah Roberts and Safiya Noble from the Department of Gender Studies, Achuta Kadambi and John Villasenor from the School of Engineering, and Eugene Volokh, Andrew Selbst, Sharon Dolovich, Jennifer Mnookin, and Mark McKenna from the School of Law.
These events addressed a range of issues on the cutting edge of the law and technology, such as the pros and cons of sanctions affecting Russian internet access, ethics and accountability in the tech sector and the implications of the Dobbs ruling on abortion rights for our understandings of digital surveillance and online freedom of speech. ITLP also hosted its first-ever symposium, in collaboration with the UCLA Journal of Law and Technology, and a Tech Careers Day that featured UCLA Law alumni from Meta, Airbnb and YouTube and lawyers from Jones Day, Perkins Coie, Irell & Manella and Kirkland & Ellis. The latter event was particularly popular, with more than 130 students in attendance.
One of ITLP’s final events of the academic year was carried out in partnership with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Forum on Viewpoint Diversity in Tech and Innovation brought together students and scholars representing contrasting viewpoints on big tech, the future of artificial intelligence, and social media policy. Participants were able to engage in substantive conversations about these issues and build the skills necessary for conducting complicated debates with nuance and civility.
ITLP faculty, students, and staff also met with several visiting foreign delegations: Representatives from the South Korean Ministry of Justice solicited information on regulating the impact of technology on the practice of law, and Canada’s minister of foreign affairs sought discussions on the intersection of disinformation and democracy.
The Lowell Milken Institute (LMI) has established itself as an important venue for discussion of current and controversial issues that affect the business law community. A recent example was its program on the Rooney Rule. The National Football League adopted this rule more than 20 years ago to encourage diversity and inclusion in the upper ranks of NFL teams. The Rooney Rule has always had critics as well as supporters, and versions of the rule have been applied to other business organizations, including law firms. Most recently, in a high-profile lawsuit, former NFL coach Brian Flores alleged that the league was not respecting the rule in its hiring decisions at the senior level.
Shortly after Flores filed his lawsuit in February, LMI hosted Jim Rooney and Professor N. Jeremi Duru of American University’s Washington College of Law in a discussion of the Rooney Rule and its application to companies and other organizations. Caren Ulrich Stacy, CEO of the Diversity Lab and a leading proponent of the Rooney Rule’s application to law firms, moderated the program. Cosponsors of the event were UCLA Law’s Ziffren Institute for Media, Entertainment, Technology and Sports Law and UCLA’s Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Jim Rooney is the son of Dan Rooney, the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who chaired the NFL committee that adopted the Rooney Rule. Professor Duru’s scholarship includes sports law and the intersection of sports and race. Rooney and Duru discussed how to improve and expand the application of the Rooney Rule to businesses and organizations throughout the country. With the Flores lawsuit as the backdrop, Rooney, Duru and Stacy dove into the several controversies surrounding the rule, including its benefits and weaknesses. The panel also examined the proper application of the rule, as well as its potential for transforming businesses in many areas of the economy besides sports. More than 150 people attended the online program and participated in a robust question and discussion period.
In September 2021, the Lowell Milken Institute announced the creation of the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits, led by Faculty Director Jill Horwitz, the David Sanders Professor in Law and Medicine. Horwitz, a nationally recognized expert on nonprofit law, was also a reporter for the American Law Institute’s first Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations, published in 2021.
A chief goal of the program is to become an indispensable resource for the study of nonprofits and philanthropy. The successful first year includes:
• Hiring Rose Chan Loui, an experienced tax lawyer in the nonprofit space, to serve as director of the program.
• Holding a successful inaugural symposium on the Restatement of Charitable Nonprofit Organizations that convened leading scholars and practitioners on nonprofit law. The scholarship created for the symposium will be published on UCLA Law Review ’s Discourse platform.
• Hosting a breakfast workshop for the general counsels of California nonprofit hospitals.
• Creating a new course at the law school on Nonprofit Law and Policy developed by Professor Horwitz.
• Planning the program’s inaugural conference, held at the end of September, on the Restatement, Charitable Nonprofit
Organizations that convened leading scholars on nonprofit law and featured new scholarship that will be published by the UCLA Law Review ’s Discourse platform.
• Co-hosting the 26th Annual Western Conference on Tax Exempt Organizations with Loyola Law School. This conference, to be held in December, is the premier event on the West Coast for practitioners, regulators, academics and senior members of nonprofits and tax exempt organizations.
In 2018, the Lowell Milken Institute launched the Program on Professional Development, aimed primarily at first-year law students. The program is intended to teach and provide the opportunity to practice skills that are fundamental to the successful junior lawyer, and after four years, it has distinguished UCLA from many of its peer schools.
The program is open to all 1Ls free of charge and offers short classes in three areas:
• Technology for Lawyers
• Building a Personal Brand
• Mental Wellness
Modern practice requires lawyers to be proficient with Word, Excel and other software tools. Clients and law partners expect no less.
The Technology for Lawyers classes, some of the most popular, train future litigators and transactional lawyers in formatting a critical brief or agreement. Students are enthusiastic about these courses, and as one student says, “The technology courses, particularly Word and Adobe, are going to be invaluable. Automating tasks and being comfortable with the advanced features of Word is going to help me stand out and deliver better-quality work.”
Many law students think of law solely as an analytical activity. Successful lawyers, however, know that the practice of law requires skill in performance as well, whether they are arguing before a judge or counseling a client. Many of the same skills that are fundamental to performing artists—actors, singers and dancers—are important in becoming a persuasive advocate and trusted counselor.
Allegra Gorchynski ’18 is a civil litigator in Los Angeles. Before law school, Gorchynski was an opera singer and soloist with extensive experience performing for numerous audiences in concerts, recitals, galas and shows in Los Angeles, throughout California and internationally. In January 2022, she taught students in the Professional Development Program how to hone performance skills to help them in their careers.
The philanthropist, investor and businessman Peter D. Kaufman made a generous gift to support the program and its growth.
In August 2022, scholars at the Williams Institute and others filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. In this case, the court will decide whether the First Amendment allows a designer of wedding
websites to refuse to serve same-sex couples in violation of Colorado’s nondiscrimination law.
The brief—authored by Ilan H. Meyer, the institute’s distinguished senior scholar of public policy, and Elana Redfield, its new federal policy director, along with the pro bono assistance of
In June 2022, the Williams Institute released a report on the transgender population in the United States. It estimated that 1.3 million adults (0.6% of adults) and 300,000 teens ages 13 to 17 (1.4% of youth) identify as transgender.
Number of transgender youth in the 50 states and D.C
The report updates the first estimates made of the country’s transgender population, published by the institute in 2016. Advances in survey methods over the past five years provided a more accurate picture of youth who identify as transgender—the number in the current study has doubled from the previous estimate.
Transgender individuals are younger on average than the general U.S. population. Of those who identify as transgender, nearly one in five is aged 13 to 17, compared with less than one in ten at that age in the general U.S. population.
The new estimates come during a year when an unprecedented number of state policies and bills have targeted transgender youth. More than 200 anti-transgender bills were introduced in state legislatures, and several were signed into law. Most of the bills focused on prohibiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, banning access to bathrooms that align with their gender identity, and preventing transgender students from participating in school sports. At the same time, the Biden administration has advanced policies to protect transgender students from harassment and discrimination in schools, health care, and other settings.
“Better collection of data about transgender youth on federal surveys is vital to understand the characteristics, experiences, wellbeing, and needs of a vulnerable population,” says Jody L. Herman, the Williams Institute’s senior scholar of public policy. “These new estimates show us that current policy debates regarding access to gender-affirming care and the ability to participate in team sports likely impact more youth than we previously thought.”
The institute’s report—“How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?”—was authored by institute scholars Jody L. Herman; Andrew R. Flores, affiliated scholar; and Kathryn O’Neill, policy analyst.
the law firm Paul Hastings—demonstrates that refusals of service subject same-sex couples and LGBT individuals to substantial and enduring harm.
The court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case in the 2022–2023 term.
Despite four decades of advances in treatment and prevention, most states still have laws targeting people living with HIV.
The term “HIV criminalization” is used to describe laws that either criminalize otherwise legal conduct or increase the penalties for illegal conduct based on a person’s HIV-positive status. More than twothirds of U.S. states and territories have enacted such laws.
Supported by more than $800,000 in grants from Gilead Sciences, the Williams Institute over the past two years has produced research that documents the continued impact of HIV criminal laws on people living with HIV. An analysis of data from 10 states has shown that Black people and women are overrepresented in HIV criminal enforcement. HIV criminal laws also have a disproportionate impact on sex workers.
“Whatever the intent of these laws, their impact is best understood in terms of race, not risk,” says Brad Sears, the institute’s founding executive director and the principal investigator of the HIV criminalization project. “They do nothing to prevent HIV transmission but exacerbate the criminal legal system’s disproportionate impact on Black people.”
Most HIV criminal laws in the U.S. were enacted when little was known about HIV and there was widespread fear of the disease. Most do not require transmission of HIV, the intent to transmit HIV, or even participation in an activity that could cause HIV to be transmitted. And the laws do not consider whether the person living with HIV is in treatment and virally suppressed and therefore unable to transmit HIV.
Thousands of people throughout the U.S. have been affected by these HIV criminal laws, which can carry felony convictions and, in some states, lifelong registration as a sex offender. The laws have also undermined public health efforts aimed at reducing the spread of HIV.
“HIV criminal laws disproportionately affect the communities most impacted by HIV,” says Nathan Cisneros, HIV criminalization analyst at the Williams Institute. “It is vital that they are modernized to bring them up to date with current HIV treatment and prevention.”
This year, the Hollywood Reporter again recognized UCLA Law as the nation’s top entertainment law school, but that distinction is not stopping the Ziffren Institute. Over the past 12 months, the institute has launched a Name, Image and Likeness Clinic designed to give law students frontline experience as they advise UCLA’s student athletes on how best to maximize the freedom now afforded them to endorse products and in other ways monetize their personas, and developed a new course on talent representation co-taught by prominent industry figures Julia Johnson (ICM) and Craig Wagner (Paradigm); it will also introduce new courses on video game law (taught by the institute’s executive director, Cindy Lin) and brand management (taught by UCLA Law alumna and Snap counsel Courtney Michel). The Documentary Film Legal Clinic continues its success in training law students while advising independent filmmakers. Many of the clinic’s clients reached audiences this past year, with outlets including Netflix, HBO, and several top film festivals. A recent project, Free Chol Soo Lee —the story of a Korean American man wrongly accused of murder—is currently having a successful theatrical run after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. But what really lies behind the Hollywood Reporter ’s recognition is the institute’s continued investment in both students and alumni. From classroom events to social interactions to simple one-onone conversations, the institute promotes its belief that the best way to learn, teach and inspire is to do it together, in vibrant collaboration amongst friends, alumni, donors, and students.
The 46th Annual UCLA Entertainment Symposium ran as a virtual webinar series this past summer, reaching its largest-ever global audience. The program—“Fungible Hollywood: From Box Office to Bytes to Blockchain”—examined the ongoing collision between yesterday’s business models and today’s technologies. Expert panelists explored a variety of topics: the streaming wars, NFTs and their role in the entertainment industry, the growing podcast business, the ethical and legal issues involved in AI, avatars and deepfakes (discussed by the John H. Mitchell Panel on Ethics and Entertainment), and the rise of the multimedia star-entrepreneur. The series culminated in a keynote conversation between Ziffren Institute founder Ken Ziffren and Mary Parent, the chairperson of worldwide production at Legendary Entertainment and a producer twice nominated for an Oscar; their conversation was followed by an in-person, on-campus reception to celebrate the speakers, donors, and friends who worked tirelessly on the event. Thanks are due to symposium leaders Elsa Ramo, Matthew Thompson, Lawrence Ulman, Craig Wagner and Christa Zofcin Workman.
Thanks to recent changes in NCAA policy, UCLA’s student athletes are now free to earn money by endorsing products, appearing in advertisements, and in other ways building and monetizing their own personal brand in “name, image and likeness” (NIL) deals. While this might sound like big news only for the gymnasts, football players, and basketball players who are already household names, it’s notable because it means that student athletes whose sports have not historically generated much revenue or recognition can now earn money to help them pay bills, wipe out loans, and possibly invest in their futures. Recognizing this policy change as a unique opportunity to support some young Bruins, the Ziffren Institute partnered with UCLA Athletics to launch a clinic where law students from the media, entertainment, technology and sports law specialization team up with UCLA athletes to evaluate potential NIL deals, flagging potential issues ranging from thirdparty intellectual property clearances to compliance with evolving FTC regulations. The clinic was founded by talent lawyers Brian Lazarus and Michael Hartman (both of Ziffren Brittenham) and Ziffren Executive Director Cindy Lin.
Earlier this year, California governor Gavin Newsom signed comprehensive legislation aimed at significantly reducing single-use waste. The law will affect almost every type of plastic packaging found in supermarket aisles in California—and is a major step in the fight to reduce plastic waste, says Emmett Institute Deputy Director Julia Stein.
Stein created and runs the California Environmental Legislation and Policy Clinic, which supported State Senator Ben Allen and his staff in crafting the plastics bill. The clinic is an innovative class in which students work hand in hand with California lawmakers to develop novel legislative solutions to environmental problems. Other recent efforts supported by clinic students include pending legislation from Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia to provide farmworkers with more protection from harmful air pollution; a bill sponsored by Allen to empower California communities to innovatively address sealevel rise; and an effort by State Senator Sydney Kamlager to ramp up protections for community members from the harmful effects of oil and gas drilling.
This semester, 12 students are again participating in the clinic, led by Stein along with Emmett/Frankel Fellow Beth Kent ‘18. The class, having quickly become a favorite among institute students, is routinely oversubscribed. “The clinic gave me an understanding of how policy is crafted, from research and writing to collecting the right information and organizing it into recommendations,” 3L Jasmine Robinson said. Among other projects, students this semester are devising ways to support small farmers and farmers of color through the implementation of California groundwater management legislation and assisting a legislative office as it prepares for international climate negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, this November.
Emmett Institute faculty are contributing to new international initiatives shaping environmental law and policy:
• Faculty co-director William Boyd is co-lead of a European Law Institute initiative to develop principles for climate justice that are workable in practice.
• Timothy Malloy, the Frank G. Wells Endowed Chair in Environmental Law, was appointed chair of the Global Electronics Council’s Reduction of Chemicals of Concern Technical Committee, part of a standards development process for the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) ecolabel. These standards are aimed at reducing toxic chemicals in electronic products and manufacturing processes, increasing knowledge and transparency on chemical use in electronics and the supply chain and identifying safer alternatives to hazardous substances.
• Mary Nichols, former chair of the California Air Resources Board and now Emmett Institute Distinguished Counsel, was named by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to the newly launched High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities. The group’s charge is to develop stronger and clearer standards for net-zero emissions pledges by non-state entities—including businesses, investors, cities and regions—to ensure that climate commitments are transparent, credible, backed by robust implementation plans, and converted into real emissions cuts as rapidly as possible.
• Ted Parson, the institute’s faculty director and the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, briefed the inaugural meeting of the Climate Overshoot Commission, an independent group of global leaders considering the risks associated with global temperatures exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The commission will address the unprecedented and severe challenges to governance presented by such risks, as well as the full range of responses potentially available to manage them, including rapid intensification of emissions cuts, adaptation measures, greenhouse-gas removals and solar geoengineering. Comprised of four former presidents and prime ministers, eight former national ministers, two leaders of major environmental groups, and two leaders of intergovernmental organizations, the commission has a majority of representatives from the Global South. Parson, who led a discussion on present knowledge and debate over governance of solar geoengineering interventions, contributed to the formation of the commission, and two former Emmett Institute fellows serve on the commission’s secretariat’s executive staff.
• James Salzman, the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, participated as part of a group of experts for the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosure, an international body developing standards for financial institutions to measure and report the impacts of their activities on the environment.
• Emmett Institute faculty co-director Alex Wang spearheaded a multiyear international research project on the design and implementation of emissions-trading systems aimed at reducing climate pollution. Wang collaborated with research groups at Tsinghua University, the California-China Climate Institute, UCLA and Wuhan University to exchange lessons from policy development and to improve the effectiveness of climate change regulation across jurisdictions. One result of the collaboration is a report by Wang and Emmett Institute fellows Daniel CarpenterGold and Andria So exploring governance issues in California’s carbon cap-and-trade system and drawing lessons for China’s national emissions-trading system, which launched last year.
UCLA Law’s Environmental Law program, led by the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, is No. 1 in the U.S. News & World Repor ts rankings released in the spring, tied with Pace Law School and Berkeley Law as the best in the nation. The specialty rankings reflect ratings by academics at peer law schools.
In the 2010 landmark decision Padilla v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel demands that criminal defense attorneys inform their clients of adverse immigration consequences that may flow from a guilty plea. In 2022, Ingrid Eagly, the Criminal Justice Program’s (CJP) faculty director—along with UCLA Law alumnae Tali Gires, Rebecca Kutlow, and Eliana Navarro Gracian— published an article in the Stanford Law Review that investigates the Padilla decision’s implementation in California’s public defense system. While the study finds that most large counties with institutional public defender offices have hired full-time immigration experts, it also identifies an acute need to improve the state’s Padilla delivery system. This need is particularly urgent in California’s small and rural counties, which generally rely on a contract system for appointing defense counsel. The article offers a range of policy recommendations for how to improve the representation of immigrants in California’s criminal legal system.
In 2021, the Criminal Justice Program published the report “A Closer Look at Los Angeles County Probation’s Citation Diversion Program.” Authored by Leah Zeidler-Ordaz, the youth justice policy lead, the report investigated a “diversion” program for youth run by the Los Angeles Probation Department. It found that the program was saddling youth in Los Angeles County with debt and driver’s license holds—collateral consequences that were burdening them for years. These types of punitive outcomes are inconsistent with best practices in youth diversion, and the report therefore recommended the program’s closure. The report and its recommendations led to the closure of the probation program in 2022 and a rerouting of these cases to community-led and evidence-based youth diversion programs.
Together with UCLA Law’s Criminal Justice Law Review, CJP hosted a virtual symposium series in fall 2021 with the topic “Restorative Justice Origins, Applications and Futures.” The series brought together panelists and audience members across the globe to discuss the history of restorative justice, its incorporation into the legal academy, and the ways in which it can be used as an alternative to the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Panelists included Justice Robert Yazzie, Sonya Shah, Kempis “Ghani” Songster, and Professor Thalia González.
As calls for decarceration increase across the country, many jurisdictions have turned to electronic monitoring in lieu of traditional pretrial detention. In 2022, CJP released a report, “Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Los Angeles County, 2015–2021,” which was the first study to analyze longitudinal data on electronic monitoring (EM). Written by Alicia Virani, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Director of the Criminal Justice Program, the report revealed that the number of Angelenos on pretrial EM increased by 5,250% over the past six years, with the majority of people spending at least 65 days on EM pretrial. The report also included significant findings on the rate of reincarceration of those on EM, the demographics of those placed on EM and judicial behavior regarding EM across LA County.
This past academic year, the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy offered law students a unique opportunity to study the dynamic field of food litigation through a seminar taught by David Biderman and Thomas Tobin, who actively litigate in the expanding niche sector of food law at the multinational law firm Perkins Coie.
The seminar featured guest speakers hailing from various practices in food litigation. Among them was Jerry W. Blackwell, a prominent civil rights attorney and trial lawyer who formed part of the prosecution team for the Derek Chauvin murder trial. Blackwell has extensive experience litigating high-profile cases related to product liability, class actions and commercial disputes. Students also heard from Mark Lanier, who is considered one of America’s top civil trial lawyers and is best known for his success in some of the country’s largest product litigation suits.
Food policy transects many areas of life, providing a unique lens to examine issues across various fields of study. To investigate one such issue, the Resnick Center in March 2022 partnered with the Prison Law and Policy Program at UCLA Law to cohost the panel discussion “Nutrition in Prison: Policies & Realities.” Attendees heard a variety of perspectives from panelists as they discussed the ambiguity of the term “nutritionally adequate meals” and elaborated on how their work is addressing urgent issues related to food and nutrition for incarcerated people. Speakers included Leslie Soble, of Impact Justice’s Food in Prison Project; Clark Kelso, the federal receiver for California Prison Medical Care; and Heile Gantan, a policy advocacy fellow with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. This event was organized by UCLA Law students Candace Yaminishi, Korbin Felder, and Kaila Johnson.
Innovation in food regulation worldwide ranges from product labeling to food waste to nutrition programs. In recognition of the important role law can make in meeting the changing needs of an evolving global food system, the Resnick Center is expanding its coverage of international food law: It will publish books foundational to international food law and governance of international food institutions; form formal and informal partnerships with global institutions and universities involved in food policy; engage in funded, mission-based projects to improve food regulation worldwide; and offer new courses and opportunities for students and faculty.
One of these efforts was realized with the publication of a book on food fraud, co-authored by Michael Roberts in conjunction with the legal department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The book explores the complexities of food fraud, international regulatory frameworks and strategies to counter fraud at the national level, and it will be presented to FAO member countries.
The Resnick Center was also a co-sponsor of CLE International’s sixth annual Food Law Conference, titled “Current Trends & Perspectives Beyond the Beltway.” The conference, held over Zoom in April, featured a variety of sessions that touched on different facets of international food law. In the Future of Food Law session, the executive director of the Resnick Center, Michael Roberts, discussed the powerful role of information and artificial intelligence in transforming the way we grow, eat and market food and raised concerns about the democratization of data so that all people can benefit from such advancements.
In addition, this past summer UCLA undergraduate students had the opportunity to study food history and culture in the birthplace of food studies. Michael Roberts and UCLA professor of history Robin Derby co-taught an interdisciplinary study abroad curriculum—“Atlantic Foodways: Culture, Science, and Governance”—in Rome and Pisa. The month-long program consisted of two courses, one of which introduced Italian food history, and the other that addressed the emergence and development of international food bodies. Students were able to experience the remarkable culinary culture of Italy through excursions and guest lectures on food history and law and to observe artisanal culinary practices and sustainable forms of production.
Growing global challenges in the realm of food require innovative thinking and bold action, a philosophy that led to a generous $13.5 million endowment to create the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies. The institute hopes to improve the health and well-being of the individual, the community and the planet through a systembased, interdisciplinary approach and to implement practical solutions to some of the great challenges the world is facing with food. Michael Roberts has been appointed to the institute’s Director’s Council, which will guide the leadership of the new institute and its strategy.
In April 2022, UCLA Law hosted its fifth annual U. Serve L.A. celebration, honoring pro bono and public interest work in the UCLA Law community. Sponsored by the law school’s public interest programs, U. Serve L.A. has raised significant funds since its inception to support various public interest initiatives, including service-learning trips and summer fellowships. U. Serve L.A. also recognizes pro bono and public interest achievements of students and alumni and this year honored four graduates for their public interest contributions: Andres Kwon ’16, policy counsel and senior organizer with the ACLU of Southern California, for the defense of immigrants in the criminal legal system; Tasha Hill ’14, principal of the Hill Law Firm, for advocacy on behalf of incarcerated LGBTQIA+ people; Marisa Hernandez Stern ’10, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice and a bar association leader, for championing diversity, equity and inclusion in the legal profession; and Nana Gyamfi ’92, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just
Immigration, for activism on behalf of human rights and Black lives.
A fifth alumna, Dorothy Wolpert ’76, a partner at Bird, Marella, Boxer, Wolpert, Nessim, Drooks, Lincenberg & Rhow, was recognized for her decades of pro bono work, including work on behalf of unhoused Angelenos and immigrant garment workers. UCLA Law also established the Dorothy and Stanley Wolpert Public Interest Law Fellowship, to provide financial support for UCLA Law students working at the Inner City Law Center (ICLC), one of the nonprofits to which Dorothy Wolpert donated countless pro bono hours throughout her long career. This summer, the inaugural Wolpert Fellow was James Degen ’24, who worked in ICLC’s tenant defense project.
The U. Serve L.A. 2022 event also honored 10 students for their pro bono service: J.D. students Joseph Gaylin ‘24, Shireen Jalali-Yazdi ’24, Joseph Kim ’23, Nicole Powell ’23, Christina Gutierrez ’22, Shyann Murphy ’22 and Joe Philipson ’22; LL.M. students Alexandra Ferraro ’22 and Deryne Sim ’22; and M.L.S. student Eduardo Miranda.
Two nationally recognized racial justice advocates visited UCLA Law as Margaret Levy Public Interest Fellows in the previous academic year to explore the subject “Race and (In)Justice” in the legal system. In October 2021, Janai Nelson ’96, the new president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, visited virtually to speak on the theme “Fighting Racial Injustice in a Vacuum of Truth”; her talk highlighted the challenges and opportunities of seeking racial justice in an anti-truth era. In March 2022, UCLA Law welcomed Brendon Woods, the public defender for Alameda County, California, and a leading voice on racism in the criminal legal system, for its first in-person Levy Fellowship visit since February 2020. Woods’s talk, “Black Lives Matter on Juries,” explored the ways in which racism affects the choice of jurors and, ultimately, whether the criminal legal system can deliver true justice.
Launched by the Epstein program in 2018 with the generous support of alumna Margaret Levy ’75, the Levy Fellowship brings outstanding public interest leaders to UCLA Law for multiday visits that include talks, discussions and meetings with students and faculty.
Students, alumni and friends gather for 5th annual U. Serve L.A.
Says Brad Sears, the law school’s associate dean of public interest law, “U. Serve L.A. is a celebration of both public interest advocacy at its best and UCLA Law’s deep commitment to serving the most vulnerable in our communities. We are grateful for all the support this past year, which allowed us to start the Wolpert Fellowship and aid the law school’s many exciting public interest initiatives.”
This year, the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy celebrates 25 years of training public interest lawyers and leaders. As the first specialization at UCLA Law, the Epstein program was founded to fill a gap in academic teaching, practical training, and moral support for future public interest advocates. The program now has more than 140 students and nearly 800 alumni working across the U.S. and internationally on diverse issues, with alumni serving in elected office as well as in the leadership of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and philanthropic foundations. The program drew a record of more than 900 applications in each of the past two years, resulting in a highly competitive admission rate of approximately 9%.
To celebrate its 25 years, the Epstein program will highlight its rich history and examine the future of public interest lawyering at this moment of significant change in our judicial and democratic systems as part of the 2023 U. Serve L.A. celebration and fundraiser, on Sunday, March 12, 2023. Updates on anniversary activities can be found on social media (Instagram @uclalawpilp; Twitter @uclawpilp).
Founded in 2021, UCLA Law’s new Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy (CRHLP) sprang into action this summer in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and removed federal recognition of the right to abortion.
On June 24, 2022, the day the court overturned Roe, the center hosted “From the Frontlines: A Conversation on the Supreme Court Ruling,” a webinar attended by more than a thousand people in which faculty discussed the court’s ruling and its repercussions for abortion rights and constitutional rights more generally.
Post-Dobbs, while many states have acted to restrict abortion access, California has worked to solidify the state’s position as a safe haven for reproductive rights. CRHLP has participated in several of these efforts: It has worked with the LA County Board of Supervisors to develop written recommendations for implementing the county’s commitment to ensuring access to reproductive health care. It has contributed to multiple reports for the county, making recommendations on five directives that will improve access to care: improving medical training about pregnancy and abortion, expanding the reproductive health care workforce, creating a uniform referral system, addressing health disparities, and committing budget resources for care.
CRHLP has also been deeply involved in the development of Prop 1, the proposed amendment to the California Constitution protecting reproductive freedom, including the rights to abortion and contraception. The center’s faculty director, Cary Franklin, testified about Prop 1 before the California Senate Judiciary Committee this summer, and spoke with countless journalists and the editorial boards of newspapers across the state, answering questions about the legal import of the amendment. On November 8th, California voters voted resoundingly in favor of Prop 1, making it part of the California Constitution.
A few days before the Supreme Court issued Dobbs, CRHLP published a study estimating that between 8,000 and 16,100 people will travel to California each year for abortion care from states where abortion will be banned. Of these, the report estimates that between 4,700 and 9,400 will come to LA County. The study’s midrange estimates are that 10,600 people will come each year, 6,200 of whom will travel to LA County. This study has been widely cited by the media.
The center has quickly become a leading authority on questions related to reproductive rights. Center faculty and staff have been cited more than a hundred times over the past few months in many of the nation’s leading publications and have appeared on programs including CBS News and PBS NewsHour.
A core part of CRHLP’s mission is training the next generation of leaders focused on sexual and reproductive rights through fellowships and scholarships. This year, CRHLP hired two postgraduate law fellows and is supporting two students in the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy.
Kennedy Willis is a postgraduate fellow with CRHLP and a 2022 graduate of UCLA Law School.
Jaclyn Serpico is a postgraduate fellow with CRHLP and a 2022 graduate of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Mikayla Tran is a CRHLP scholarship recipient in the David J. Epstein Program and a member of the UCLA Law School Class of 2025.
Alanna McNaughton is a CRHLP scholarship recipient in the David J. Epstein Program and a member of the UCLA Law School Class of 2025.
CRHLP has begun to develop pro bono opportunities for UCLA law students and alumni, as well as the broader legal community.
Medical-Legal Partnership with Planned Parenthood Los Angeles: CRHLP is building a medical-legal partnership with Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA) and the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) at PPLA’s Inglewood Health Center. The new center is part of PPLA’s Black Health Initiative to reduce racial inequities in health by addressing the community’s needs in a holistic way. In May 2022, CRHLP members attended the grand opening of the Inglewood center to begin assessing the community’s legal needs. In fall 2022, CRHLP began providing know-your-rights trainings to community members and will eventually provide legal services at the center with support from UCLA Law students.
Southern California Legal Alliance for Reproductive Justice: CRHLP faculty and staff are developing an alliance to provide legal support and advice to abortion patients, providers, and supporters confronted with new legal risks, including civil and criminal liability under other states’ laws. Faculty and staff have met with reproductive justice activists, criminal defense attorneys, bar associations, and private firms to build the alliance. As this initiative develops, UCLA Law alumni and students will have opportunities to participate through CRHLP.
Comprehensive Sex Ed Implementation Project: CRHLP is partnering with EducateUS, a nonprofit group that seeks to advance progressive sex education policy, to ensure that schools across California are implementing the state’s comprehensive sex education law, the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA). CRHLP identified a school in Central California that is not complying with CHYA and has met with teachers in the district to better understand the problems and to formulate steps to address them. The center has engaged students in pro bono research for this project and plans to continue to work with students to ensure that schools in LA County are complying with CHYA.
UCLA Law’s Native Nations Law & Policy Center serves Native American communities with legal expertise and provides UCLA Law students with opportunities to work with tribal leaders “to strengthen legal systems on tribal lands while protecting and advancing tribal culture and legal values.” Carole E. Goldberg, distinguished research professor and the Jonathan D. Varat Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita, founded the center in 2020. New resources—major gifts and an expanded team—are now enabling the center to provide further support to Native Nations and offer more opportunities for students.
A landmark gift in 2020 from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria funded the Graton Scholars, a program in which scholarships have now been awarded to seven students; five new students will be funded each year in perpetuity. This summer, a new $4.3 million gift from Graton Rancheria was announced—it will endow two chairs in Native American law, one in honor of Goldberg and the other in honor of Greg Sarris, who has been chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria since 1992.
“These new endowed chairs honor two true leaders in securing legal rights and justice for Native Nations, Carole Goldberg and Greg Sarris,” says the center’s current director, Angela R. Riley, professor of law and American Indian studies at UCLA and special adviser to the chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. “UCLA Law has long been a national leader in the field, and these chairs cement our standing. This gift also allows us to realize the unprecedented growth of our program for the benefit of all of Indian country.”
Riley also directs UCLA’s joint degree (J.D./M.A.) program in Law and American Indian Studies. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she currently serves as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the nation, a post she has held since 2010.
Justice and legal rights for Native Nations is increasingly a part of public legal discourse, and the Native Nations Law & Policy Center has been influential in that regard. Highlighting that impact, Riley gave the 11th annual John Paul Stevens Lecture at the University of Colorado Law School on October 18, 2022—the first time that a justice of a high court of an Indigenous nation has given the lecture. Sponsored by the Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, the event’s previous speakers have included Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor.
“Delivering the Stevens Lecture was an enormous honor for me,” says Riley. “It gave me the opportunity to elevate the importance of tribal law and Indian law within the broader legal community. My lecture focused on Native Nations as the ‘third sovereign’ within the American legal framework and discussed the role of tribal courts in ensuring justice in Indian country.”
Today, the Native Nations Law & Policy Center is benefiting from an expanded team: Director Riley; Lauren van Schilfgaarde ’12, Cochiti Pueblo and Research Fellow at UCLA Law; Mica Llerandi, Diné/Navajo and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Director of the Tribal Legal Development Clinic; Alexandra Fay, the inaugural Richard M. Milanovich Fellow in Law (funded by a gift from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians); and Heather Morphew, the center’s administrative assistant.
The expanded team and greater resources are translating into further influence. An example of the center’s ability to reach a broad national and international audience is its ongoing series of webinars on Indian law. A July 2022 event about the Supreme Court decision Castro-Huerta v. Oklahoma—which upended more than 200 years of settled law in Indian country—attracted more than 300 attendees and garnered nearly 1,400 views when posted to YouTube.
The center’s Tribal Legal Development Clinic continues to work with tribal clients and organizations on many issues, including promoting cultural resource protections, another of Riley’s major interests. “I’ve been working for some time with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is an agency of the United Nations,” she says. “A project on ‘Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore’ proved a good match for the clinic. This created an opportunity for Lauren van Schilfgaarde and two clinic students to go to Geneva in September to participate in the discussions.
“We are really enhancing and building the program founded by Professor Goldberg,” says Riley. “UCLA Law has become the national program for Native students and others interested in Indian law.”
When Dorothy Wolpert ’76 started at UCLA School of Law, she wasn’t the typical new student. Nearing 40, she had just celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary and was the mother of two boys, 10 and 13.
It wasn’t the difference in age or experience that made Wolpert stand out, though. It was her wit, intelligence, charm and passion. With those qualities—and her husband, Stanley, already a successful UCLA history professor, at her side—she forged a career in law of uncommon decency and service.
It had always been her dream to be a trial attorney. “Law involved three things that I loved,” recalls Wolpert today. “Research, writing, and talking. To me, being a lawyer meant being a litigator.”
A native of New York City, she met Stanley Wolpert while she was a freshman at City College, part of the City University of New York. They soon married and moved to Philadelphia so Stanley could pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Dorothy continued her own studies at Penn, but the couple soon found themselves moving to India for Stanley’s research.
It was an experience Dorothy had soon after they returned to the U.S., while just a few credits shy of her college degree, that persuaded her that her dream of law was possible. Stanley received an offer from UCLA, and the couple moved to Los Angeles.
Dorothy wanted to complete her Penn degree at UCLA, but Penn informed her that it did not award degrees to seniors who were not in residence in Pennsylvania. “I then had an epic battle with Penn and won,” says Wolpert. “And contrary to the odds! I badgered them until they conceded.”
Was it persuasion or persistence that won the day?
“Oh, I definitely wore them down,” Wolpert says, laughing. After her success in arguing with Penn and completing her final credits at UCLA, she took the LSAT and prayed for acceptance to UCLA Law. “It was the only viable option,” she says. “We couldn’t afford USC, and I couldn’t leave town.”
At the law school, she learned from UCLA Law legends such as Professors Kenneth Karst, Gary Schwartz, Mel Nimmer, Jesse Dukeminier, Dick Maxwell and David Binder.
Though Dorothy had been an excellent student, she found that being older and a mother meant that job hunting was no easy task. She received so many letters that began, “We regret to inform you…” that Stanley joked, “I’m going to print up cards that say ‘It’s your loss’ to send back to them.”
Dorothy didn’t let the letters slow her down. Realizing her traditional résumé wasn’t working, she developed a new strategy: humor. She wrote a letter introducing her experiences prior to law, including balancing a family with a career, as unique skills that could benefit a law firm, and she included her date of birth with “[sic] ” after it, even though the date was not a typo.
Her unorthodox approach landed her a position at the leading entertainment law firm of the day—Kaplan, Livingston, Goodwin, Berkowitz & Selvin, whose clients included 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Orson Welles, and Ava Gardner.
Kaplan Livingston was also committed to public service, a feature of its practice that was transformative for the new associate.
Partner Bayard Berman’s pro bono leadership on the landmark case desegregating schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education, made a deep impression on Wolpert, who worked on the case. It was the most important desegregation case since Brown v. Board of Education.
“I think I was hardwired for that kind of work,” says Wolpert. “I came from a lower-middle-class background, and I was very aware of privilege versus want. It always seemed right to me to be concerned about those things.” Her work on Crawford, combined with her law school experiences in David Binder’s trial advocacy courses, cemented her own commitment to public service and led to decades of pro bono work and volunteer positions.
Court, all the U.S. District Courts in the state, and the 9th Circuit. She has been honored as both a California Litigation Star and one of the Best Lawyers in America.
The new firm also made a commitment to helping its attorneys maintain a work-life balance, an emphasis that wasn’t common anywhere in the go-go environment of the 1980s, much less among law firms. “One thing that indicates that we did it right is the number of children at our law firm,” says Dorothy. “We believed that even lawyers should live balanced lives.”
Mark T. Drooks, a principal at Bird Marella, agrees. “Dorothy and the other founding partners built that balance into the fabric of the firm. For example, for many years young lawyers did not receive any reports on their hours; the message from the firm was that they should get their work done, well, and not worry about meeting a particular target for revenue or time spent in the office.”
In 1996, Wolpert worked with Drooks on a case that helped free Thai nationals who were working in conditions of slavery in a makeshift garment factory made up of residential duplexes in El Monte, California. The case is credited as beginning the antitrafficking movement in the U.S., and it led to numerous state and federal laws to address trafficking and poor labor conditions.
In 1981, Wolpert joined four other lawyers in founding the firm now known as Bird Marella Boxer Wolpert Nessim Drooks Lincenberg & Rhow.
The founding partners of Bird Marella decided to focus exclusively on litigation and quickly developed a reputation that would last. In time, Wolpert argued before the California Supreme
Drooks, who served as lead counsel in the case, recalls Wolpert’s powerful example. “The defendants in that case demanded to depose each of our roughly 120 clients,” he says. “That was going to involve an extraordinary commitment of time and [would be] a logistical nightmare. Instead of objecting, Dorothy rounded up all the associates at the firm, parceled out the defense of the depositions, and invited the defense lawyers to knock themselves out. The lead lawyer for the other side later admitted that that moment was when they knew they were in trouble.”
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DOROTHY WOLPERT ’76Dorothy Wolpert in the first offices of Bird Marella, circa 1983
While the El Monte Thai worker slavery case is perhaps the most famous of Wolpert and Bird Marella’s pro bono cases, she and her partners have pursued more than a hundred such cases, all of them deeply meaningful to the clients and communities they supported.
Wolpert’s commitment to, as she calls it, “direct service,” led her in time to volunteer with nonprofits in Los Angeles, including the Inner City Law Center, or ICLC, whose board she served on. She donated many hours to the center and its clients in pursuing justice for low-income tenants, working poor families, homeless veterans and others.
Jim Barrall ’75, who admired Wolpert when they were law students together, has served with her on the ICLC’s Board of Directors and Board of Advisors since 2006. “I’ve never known any private sector lawyer who is more committed to fighting for justice and serving the underserved than Dorothy,” he says. “She is truly a force of nature.”
Wolpert’s approach is pragmatic. “Life is short, and one person can only do very little,” she says. “But if you can keep a family from becoming homeless and provide them with decent housing and some money to feed their children and school them, then you’ve accomplished something that’s real. It doesn’t change the world, but it’s real.
“Considering the absurd age I’ve reached,” Wolpert says, “I guess I still have a lot of energy! When I decide to do something, I put that energy into it, wanting it to be the best I can get, and you don’t always know the limit.”
Wolpert attributes all the success she’s enjoyed to the success of her marriage. “It was always a partnership,” she says, “everything we did.”
“They were manifestly in love,” says Drooks. “One could not see Dorothy and Stanley together without understanding that implicitly. And they were generous in all things, without any interest in projecting an image of power or prestige. I suspect they were far too confident for that.”
The Wolperts were married for more than 65 years, until Stanley’s death in 2019.
Together, they built a warm and intellectually engaging community and were known for inviting students, colleagues, faculty, and other interesting people to their Westwood home for delicious meals cooked by Dorothy.
With two children of her own and three grandchildren, Wolpert expresses some disbelief about expecting to be a great-grandmother soon.
Celebrating a UCLA Law legend Wolpert hasn’t slowed down. She continues to work and to volunteer at the Inner City Law Center, still finds time to mentor lawyers and UCLA Law students, and participates in UCLA Law Women LEAD, a network of alumnae.
To honor all these commitments, so many of them ongoing, UCLA Law presented Dorothy with a U. Serve L.A. award on April 13, 2022, and established the Dorothy and Stanley Wolpert Public Interest Law Fellowship to provide financial support to UCLA Law students who work for the Inner City Law Center.
Wolpert feels humbled by the attention paid to her with these distinctions. “There are so many people in this city who do good work and care about this community and our fellow humans,” she says. “To the extent that this is any kind of acknowledgment of me, I think it’s really an acknowledgment of everyone who does this work, especially at the Inner City Law Center. Those who do this day in and day out are the true heroes.”
Dorothy Wolpert at her 1976 graduation from UCLA LawIn the fall of 1981, a couple of UCLA Law students sat together, alphabetized by last name in their 1L section. They were Laurie and Guy Halgren, both class of ’84, who by that time had been married for about three years.
Today the Halgrens are nearing the end of impressive careers— Laurie as a judge and Guy in private practice. But their road to law school, and to each other, was winding, as they described in a recent conversation punctuated by laughter and the banter of a couple who have been a team for many years.
Laurie and Guy met in the fourth grade, when they studied music with the same couple—Laurie taking piano lessons from Luella Resta, and Guy taking trumpet lessons with retired West Point bandmaster Francis Resta. In high school, when he was on the math team and she was in student government, they had friends in common but weren’t particularly close. After reconnecting at a party in college, they began dating. Their first date was to a showing of the four-and-a-half-hour-long Ingmar Bergman film trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. Says Guy, “We went for pizza in the middle.”
The Halgrens married in 1978. Laurie, whose father was a dentist, worked as a dental hygienist while Guy owned and operated a plant nursery. One day, after realizing that dental hygiene “wouldn’t be something I wanted to do with my life,” Laurie came home from work and announced that she wanted to go to law school. She suggested that Guy go, too.
Laurie says Guy earned the higher LSAT score of the two, to which Guy immediately adds that Laurie got better grades in law school.
The Halgrens began their careers at law firms in their native San Diego. When a group of the partners from his first firm, Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps, left to found Sheppard Mullin’s San Diego office, Guy followed. He stayed there for the remainder of his career, becoming chairman in 2001.
After five years as a litigation associate with Gray Cary Ames & Frye, Laurie moved to the California attorney general’s office, eventually rising to deputy senior assistant attorney general before putting her name in for a judgeship.
It was after Laurie had been in consideration for the bench with no developments for about a year that Guy was nominated for the Sheppard Mullin chairmanship. The couple, who had two sons by then, knew that both positions meant substantial time commitments, at a time when their children were young. But Laurie encouraged Guy to take on the new challenge. Besides, they figured, it didn’t seem like the judicial nomination was going to happen any time soon.
But that view proved wrong. In August 2001, not long after Guy accepted the chairmanship, Laurie was appointed to the San Diego Superior Court.
Being in their hometown of San Diego had advantages during this busy time, as Guy and Laurie relied on their families to help care for their sons. Today they note—with equal affection for both sons—that one is a lawyer and one is “absolutely not a lawyer.”
In fact, one son followed in his father’s footsteps and is now an associate in the San Diego office of Sheppard Mullin, while the other works in software sales and marketing.
Guy recently retired after 20 years as chairman of Sheppard Mullin, where he presided over the firm’s growth from 290 attorneys to more than a thousand.
Laurie, who has served on the San Diego Superior Court since 2001, plans to retire in January 2023.
The Halgrens’ careers may have taken different directions, but Laurie says a common thread has been “a desire to do what’s right, to be fair.”
Laurie has served in San Diego’s civil, criminal, and family court divisions. She has been on the Superior Court’s executive committee, as well as on other leadership committees, and she currently serves on a committee that advises the California Supreme Court on judicial ethics. She also volunteered for several years with the California Judges Association’s Judicial Ethics Committee hotline.
Laurie’s colleague Judge Joan Weber says part of Laurie’s legacy will be her work in judicial ethics, noting, “She’s a statewide leader on ethical issues.” Weber says that “you’d be surprised” how often judges face ethical issues—Can I attend this event? Can I write
that op-ed?—and Laurie has been a go-to resource to help navigate those waters. Weber also points to Laurie’s founding of a courtclergy counsel that helps educate the community about legal issues and resources by engaging local clergy members about common problems their congregants may face.
UCLA Law professor Jerry Kang met Guy when Kang was speaking at a leadership conference on legal diversity in 2013. Later, Guy invited Kang to consult with Sheppard Mullin on D&I issues. Since then, Kang has continued to work with everyone, from the firm’s support staff to its partners.
One of the first interactions Kang had with Guy at Sheppard Mullin was a small group session that included top firm leaders. Kang says, “He didn’t just tell someone in the diversity office to come and talk to me.”
Sheppard Mullin partner Greg Labate ’90 says, “Diversity and inclusion is in [Guy’s] DNA.”
Laurie says she’s looking forward to her retirement. “I wanted to make sure Guy was really retiring,” she says, before she steps down.
Guy, besides a passion for gardening, enjoys golf and fly-fishing, and Laurie says he wants her to join him in these pursuits. She’s not about to become a golf enthusiast, she says, laughing, “so it looks like I’ll be doing more fishing.”
Something they both enjoy is travel. Laurie jokes that she’s looking forward to the first trip they take where Guy won’t be “looking at his phone the entire time,” as he did when he was a firm chairman.
Laurie says she’s still figuring out what she’ll do after retirement. With the same spirit that led her to take a chance on law school so many years ago, though, she says, “I’m up for an adventure.”
The Halgrens credit UCLA Law with helping students put themselves in the shoes of everyone encountering the legal system. They both used this perspective throughout their careers, in Guy’s management of an international law firm and Laurie’s work on the bench. Laurie notes that she sometimes receives letters from defendants thanking her for helping them turn their lives around.
They both say UCLA Law is not only a place where students are rigorously taught legal theory, but also a place where they learn the practice of law. With that foundation, Guy says, “the legal profession was perfect for us.”
The Halgrens’ careers may have taken different directions, but Laurie says a common thread has been “a desire to do what’s right, to be fair.”
Distinguished UCLA School of Law alumni Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw ’79 and her husband, William Wardlaw ’72, have founded a scholarship to promote the success of promising legal scholars throughout their UCLA Law education.
The Honorable Kim McLane and William Wardlaw Endowed Merit Scholarship awards full tuition to one student for three years. A new student will be selected each school year based on a rigorous assessment of such criteria as exceptional academic merit, superior leadership skills, commitment to the community and equal justice for all, and a demonstrated dedication to the highest standards of integrity. The endowed scholarship was created by a $1 million gift pledged by the Wardlaws in 2016, during the Centennial Campaign for UCLA.
“As a proud UCLA Law alumna, I am grateful that Bill and I are able to help advance UCLA Law’s mission of access, academic excellence, and commitment to justice,” says Kim Wardlaw, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. “My UCLA undergraduate education, and especially UCLA Law School, opened untold numbers of doors for me throughout my career, and I am humbled to be able to give back to the school to help its outstanding law students achieve their dreams of success and service.”
Wardlaw earned her undergraduate degree, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, at UCLA and her J.D. at UCLA Law, where she served on the Law Review, was awarded the Order of the Coif, and was named the outstanding graduate of the Class of 1979.
A native Californian, she became the first Hispanic American woman on a federal appeals court when President William Clinton appointed her to the 9th Circuit in 1998. She had previously served as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and as a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, where she and Bill Wardlaw met. She also serves on the UCLA Law Board of Advisors and is a founding board member of the UCLA Law Women LEAD network. Bill Wardlaw also served on the UCLA Law Review and was awarded the Order of the Coif. He left the practice of law to spend the last 35 years as a partner in the private equity firm Freeman Spogli. UCLA Law is a meaningful part of both the Wardlaws’ lives. Their son, Billy ’19, also attended UCLA Law School, and their daughter, Katie, is currently a 3L.
Bill Wardlaw says, “UCLA Law is important to our entire family, and we are honored to play a small part helping to educate many of the best legal minds in the nation, as they become among the country’s top lawyers.” Says Interim Dean Russell Korobkin, “This scholarship truly underscores something that I and many others in the UCLA Law community have known for a long, long time: Through their professional successes and the virtue of giving back that they model so well and, apparently, effortlessly, Kim and Bill Wardlaw are, quite simply, an inspiration. Thanks to their outstanding dedication to our law school and commitment to our students, it’s exciting to know that many more UCLA Law students and graduates will be following in their incredible footsteps.”
—KIM MCLANE WARDLAWA proud UCLA Law alumna, I am grateful that Bill and I are able to help advance UCLA Law’s mission of access, academic excellence, and commitment to justice.
In March 2022, Williams Institute founders Charles R. Williams and Stu Walter made a gift to the institute of more than $3 million. Their generous donation will support the institute’s endowment and fund a new senior scholar position.
The Williams Institute was founded in 2001 with an initial gift of $2.5 million from Williams and Walter. At the time, it was the largest donation ever made to an academic program focused on LGBT issues. It also allowed for the creation of the very first law school–based center dedicated to LGBT law and public policy in the U.S. Over the past 21 years, the couple has given more than $23 million to support the institute.
The generous gifts from Williams and Walter have supported the institute’s critical work ensuring that
laws and policies that affect LGBT people are based on facts and research, not stereotypes. Over the past two decades, the institute’s research has appeared in Supreme Court opinions from Lawrence to Obergefell; informed numerous laws, from bans on conversion therapy to nondiscrimination protections; and shed light on the lived experiences of LGBT people. And in the past two years, the institute has become a go-to resource for the Biden administration as the White House and federal agencies have issued policies supporting LGBT youth, advanced equity for LGBT people across government programs, and expanded data collection on LGBT populations.
Williams and Walter’s most recent gift will allow the institute to advance its mission and expand its reach for years to come.
Stu Walter
The 2022 Law Firm Challenge, an esteemed UCLA Law tradition, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Nearly 1,500 alumni at over 100 law firms across the country participated and continued an inspiring legacy of Bruin philanthropy. Overall, the challenge raised nearly $2 million dollars in support of UCLA Law scholarships and programs.
Altogether, 65% of UCLA Law alumni in the 118 participating firms took this year’s Law Firm Challenge. 35 firms earned gold stars, meaning that more than half of the UCLA Law alumni partners at each firm made leadership gifts of $1,000 or more.
The School of Law is deeply grateful to the participating law firms and donors—particularly the leaders who spearheaded efforts at their individual firms. Their partnership in promoting the challenge, and encouraging the generosity of their alumni peers, is essential to the continued success of this campaign.
Thank you!
SUPER STAR FIRMS 2022
(100% participation & Gold Star Status)
Baker, Burton & Lundy, PC
Del, Shaw, Moonves, Tanaka, Finkelstein & Lezcano
Garrett & Tully
Hoffman, Sabban & Smith
Leopold, Petrich & Smith
Maron & Sandler
Milbank LLP
Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, & Anello PC
Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP
The Cook Law Firm
Bird Marella Boxer Wolpert Nessim Drooks
Lincenberg & Rhow LLP
Clifford Chance US LLP
Cooley LLP
Covington & Burling LLP
Danning Gill & Diamond LLP
Davis, Polk & Wardwell LLP
Duane Morris LLP
Ervin Cohen & Jessup LLP
Fenwick & West LLP
Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve
Franklin & Hachigian LLP
Hogan Lovells LLP
Hueston Hennigan LLP
Larson LLP
Levene, Neale, Bender, Yoo & Golubchik LLP
McDermott, Will & Emery LLP
O’Neil LLP
Osborn Maledon
Paul Hastings LLP
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
Shumener, Odson, & Oh LLP
Squire Patton Boggs LLP
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Wilmerhale
Ziffren Brittenham LLP
Brown, Moskowitz, & Kallen, P.C.
Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, & Schrek LLP
Cox, Castle, and Nicholson LLP
Enenstein Pham & Glass
Glaser Weil LLP
Hirscheld Kraemer LLP
Lewis Roca LLP
Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips LLP
Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, LLP
O’Melveny & Myers LLP
Pachulski, Stang, Ziehl, & Jones LLP
Parsus LLP
Polsinelli LLP
John Arguelles ’54 was honored by the UCLA School of Law with a celebration of his career, an exhibition of his photographs outside the law library, and a new scholarship in his name. Justice Arguelles was the first UCLA Law School graduate and the second Hispanic justice to serve on the California Supreme Court. Arguelles passed away shortly after his career tribute.
Ralph Shapiro ’58 and his wife, Shirley, endowed the Shapiro Family Chair in Piano Performance with their $1 million gift. The gift primarily supports a UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music faculty member and students in piano performance.
Jim Spitser ’64 was featured in an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune about his March Madness memories. Spitser, now retired, has been to the Final Four 25 times and has watched the Bruins take the crown five times.
Arnold York ’65 has served as the publisher of the Malibu Times since 1987. Recently, he and his wife, Karen, sold the 75-year-old institution. He remarked that his greatest accomplishment over the past 35 years as publisher was never missing an issue.
Gil Garcetti ’67 was appointed to the Milton Marks “Little Hoover” Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy.
Barry Fisher ’68 was named the 2021 Warren M. Christopher International Lawyer of the Year. Fisher, a named partner at Fleishman & Fisher, focuses his practice on human rights and constitutional law on behalf of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities worldwide, including Kurds and Roma. Fisher has assisted in the drafting of constitutions and legislation for countries including Romania, Moldova, Albania, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Belarus and has consulted on legal matters in Russia, Mexico, Spain, Cambodia, Slovakia, Argentina, Canada, Germany, and England.
Tom Stindt ’70 retired after 42 years of practicing law in Los Angeles. He has spent much of the past seven years as a specialist volunteer with the Detectives Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He has supported detectives of the Van Nuys Community Station’s Theft Table, the Crimes Against Persons Table, the Major Assault Crimes unit and the Cold Case unit of the Valley Bureau’s homicide detectives.
Paul S. Meyer ’71 was appointed to the Newport Beach Civil Service Board for 2021. He continues to be active in the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Society of Barristers.
David Carter ’72 , U.S. District Court judge, was featured in an article in the Orange County Register regarding his recent ruling and conclusions concerning a dispute over emails and their connection to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
John Branca ’75 donated generously toward the new practice field at Jackie Robinson Stadium. It’s named the Branca Family Field in honor of the three-time All-Star legend Ralph Branca—the Dodger who stood next to Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947, the most remembered opening day in Major League Baseball history.
Wilma Pinder ’76 was honored at the USC Black Alumni Association 46th Annual Scholarship Dinner with the BAA Kilgore Service Award for her selfless leadership among Black students and alumni—and service that has touched the greater USC community.
Dorothy Wolpert ’76 was honored by UCLA School of Law with a U. Serve L.A. award and the establishing of the Dorothy and Stanley Wolpert Public Interest Law Fellowship to provide financial support to UCLA Law students who work for the Inner City Law Center.
David W. Evans ’77 joined the West Los Angeles–based accounting firm Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt as a partner and the firm’s first general counsel. He left the law firm Haight Brown & Bonesteel after 26 years during which he served as managing partner of the firm’s San Francisco office and acted as the firm’s general counsel. He will continue to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Helen Jacobs-Lepor ’77 was presented with an honorary fellowship from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She serves on the Board of Managers for U.S. Medical Innovations, a privately held FDA-registered biomedical device company focusing on the fields of plasma electrosurgical devices, robotic mini-invasive technology, and the eradication of cancer using cold plasma.
Daniel Hedigan ’78 joined Five Point Holdings as its new chief executive. Previously, he was president of home building at the Irvine Company.
Dean Kitchens ’78 has been appointed as a judge in the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Governor Gavin Newsom. Kitchens has been a partner at Gibson Dunn since 1986 and has served in several positions there since 1978, including general counsel.
Bernard Resser ’79 joined the Barton law firm as partner.
Michael Gendler ’80 was listed in The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” He is a founding partner at Gendler & Kelly.
Laurie Levenson ’80 was the featured guest on an episode of the podcast B.S.: Beyond Stereotypes Levenson talked about growing up white in Inglewood, other pivotal personal experiences, and why we all need to look in the mirror and face our stereotypes. She is a legal commentator for high-profile televised criminal cases. In 2019 she cofounded Girl Scout Troop 1085, a troop for girls experiencing homelessness. At Loyola Marymount Law School, Levenson is the founding director of the Loyola Project for the Innocent, the Loyola Center for Ethical Advocacy and the Fidler Institute on Criminal Justice, and a member of the senior faculty of Loyola’s Journalist Law School.
Marcy Morris ’81 was inducted into The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Legal Legends.” The list is a “Power Lawyers” special feature dedicated to honoring entertainment industry attorneys whose career achievements “are extraordinary.” Morris, an attorney at Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein, takes pride in being a mentor in the firm, helping to increase the number of female employees to nearly 40 percent over the past seven years.
Daniel Mayeda ‘82 was quoted in the Daily Star, the Guardian, Newsmax and the Daily Wire regarding Mickey Mouse leaving Disney. Mayeda is the associate director of the Documentary Film Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law. Before this appointment, he specialized in litigation involving the media and entertainment industries. He was a shareholder at Leopold, Petrich and Smith and is now an attorney with Ballard Spahr.
Jocelyn Thompson ’82 has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Apollo Silver Corporation, bringing California Resource Department expertise to the Apollo team. In addition to her project permitting experience, she will provide legal and governance support to the board and executive team. Most recently, Thompson was a partner at Alston and Bird.
James Baca ’83 is serving as managing partner at Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo, where he has been for more than 30 years, serving in many leadership positions, including chair of the firm’s largest practice group, the Southern California Education Law Practice Group, for more than 10 years; as a member of the executive committee; and most recently, as chief operating officer.
Terry White ’83 authored a book with his brother, Kerry, entitled For the People: A True Story of the Los Angeles Criminal Justice System by Two African American Prosecutors In it, the brothers recount the high-profile cases they’ve encountered over their 30-year careers, including such infamous cases as the O.J. Simpson trial and the UCLA body parts scandal, as well as other dramatic and notable cases involving celebrities, human trafficking, drug mafias and serial killers.
Leslie Gilbert-Lurie ‘84 has been appointed to the California State University Board of Trustees. The self-employed author is a member of the UCLA Foundation Board, the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Board, and the UCLA School of Law Board of Advisors. She is co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Alliance for Children’s Rights. She is also a member of the international board of directors of Human Rights Watch, the Pacific Council on International Policy and the Writers Guild of America.
Louis Gutierrez ‘84 was made the chief human capital and equity officer at Los Angeles World Airports.
Ann McMillan ‘84 was named president of the law firm Caplin & Drysdale.
Stephen Cooke ’85 has been elected to the board of directors of the Farmers & Merchants Bank of Long Beach. He is currently Of Counsel in the Securities and Capital Markets practice group of Paul Hastings in Orange County, where he has been advising clients in a wide variety of complex matters for more than 30 years and where he was a partner for 27 years. He will join the bank’s Risk and Compliance Committee and the Nominations and Corporate Governance Committee.
V. James DeSimone ’85 and his firm have filed a landmark COVID-related wrongful death suit in California, according to Lawyer News. The lawsuit centers on a man’s death from COVID-19 and places the onus directly on an employer for refusing to make reasonable workplace accommodations for someone with known underlying health problems. DeSimone’s practice is focused on seeking justice in a variety of workplace disputes.
Joanne Moore ’85 was named dean of the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University. She is an educator, university administrator, and film industry executive who most recently served as associate professor and chair of the Producing Department in the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Ann Park ‘87 became president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association and its first-ever Asian American leader. Park is a litigator and partner at Foley & Mansfield who specializes in toxic tort, asbestos products liability, and premises liability cases. She is also a past president of the Korean American Bar Association of Southern California.
Betsy Rosenthal ’84 published a new children’s book—When Lightnin’ Struck Set in Texas in 1928, it’s a story of hidden family history, friendship, and a boy’s journey of self-discovery.
Gary L. Bradus ’87 has been recognized as a “2022 Most Admired CEO” by the Sacramento Business Journal He is a shareholder in the Corporate group at Weintraub Tobin.
Alan Epstein ’87 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” A partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Epstein is in the Corporate & Financial Services Department and is chair of the firm’s Entertainment Transactions Practice.
Kenneth Kimmell ’87 was named vice president for Offshore Wind Development at Avangrid Renewables.
Alicia Miñana de Lovelace ‘87 was named new board chair of the UCLA Foundation Board of Directors and assumed her new post on July 1. Miñana de Lovelace has been a member of the foundation’s board of directors since 2015. She also chaired the UCLA School of Law Board of Advisors and has spent the past 30 years as a transactional attorney in Los Angeles.
Chuck Geerhart ‘88 was sworn in as the 2022 President of the San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association, a consumer-side organization dedicated to providing trial skills education to the bar and preserving the right to a jury trial.
Carlos Goodman ’88 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022” list of Hollywood’s Top 100 attorneys. Goodman is a founding Partner at Goodman Genow Schenkman Smelkinson & Christopher.
Scott Lenga ’88, with his father, Harry, has published a new book—The Watchmakers It tells the true story of Harry’s upbringing in a Hasidic family of watchmakers in the 1920s and ‘30s in Poland and how their watchmaking skills and an oath made by Harry and his two brothers enabled the three to survive the ghettos and camps in German-occupied Poland during the war. Set against the dark background of that period, The Watchmakers is an uplifting saga of brotherhood, optimism, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Sandy Pooler ’88 was appointed town manager of Arlington, Massachusetts. Pooler, currently Arlington’s deputy town manager/ finance director, will serve as interim town manager for the balance of the unexpired term of the previous town manager. Pooler is in talks to stay in the post until 2025, but he has plans to retire before then and is negotiating an end date.
Jason Sloane ’88 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Sloane is a founding partner at Sloane Offer Weber & Dern.
David Gabor ’89 has been named to the 2022 Southern California Super Lawyers list, an honor given to no more than 5% of California lawyers each year. Gabor is a shareholder at Weintraub Tobin and chair of the firm’s Litigation group.
John Fukunaga ’89 was named to Variety ’s list “Dealmakers Impact Report 2021: Top Negotiator Behind Mega Deals.” Fukunaga is executive vice president and deputy general counsel at Sony Pictures.
Anna McLean ’89 was named a member to Law360 ’s newly formed 2022 Consumer Protection Editorial Advisory Board. The board provides feedback on Law360 ’s coverage and expert insight on how best to shape future coverage. McLean is a partner in the business trial practice at Sheppard Mullin’s San Francisco office.
Karen Robinson ‘89 administered the State Bar oath to UCLA Law grads at the UCLA School of Law Bar Admission Ceremony in December 2021.
Leslie Ryland ’89 was elevated to principal attorney at Schaffer Family Law Group. Ryland was certified as a legal specialist in Family Law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.
Susan Shields ’89 earned a Band 1 top ranking in the Private Wealth Law category in the 2022 edition of Chambers High Net Worth. Shields is a tax and family wealth attorney with McAfee & Taft in Oklahoma. She focuses on wealth transfer tax planning for high-net-worth families and individuals, business planning for closely held family businesses, and estate and trust administration. Shields is an elected Fellow of the prestigious American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and a past president of the Oklahoma Bar Association.
Phillip Talbert ’89 was sworn in as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California. He was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden and confirmed by the Senate. Last year, Talbert assumed leadership of the office as acting U.S. attorney. He has served as an assistant U.S. attorney in this district for 19 years. Previously, Talbert was a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s criminal division. He also worked at a Seattle law firm and as a law clerk to Judge David R. Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Brian Brookey ’90 was named chair of the Tucker Ellis Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Committee. He is an Intellectual Property partner in the firm’s Los Angeles office. Brookey’s commitment to national and community EDI efforts and initiatives includes his involvement with the National LGBT Bar Association and the District of Columbia LGBT Bar Association.
Angel Juarez Navarro ’90 of the Central District of California was elected court commissioner by judges of the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Lisa Pai ’90 was appointed to the board of directors of Hope Bancorp, Inc., and the Bank of Hope, the first and only super regional Korean American bank in the United States. Pai will serve as a member of the board’s Risk Committee.
Jeff Frankel ’91 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” He is a partner at McKuin Frankel Whitehead.
Richard Hasen ’91 joined UCLA School of Law as a professor and will direct the new Safeguarding Democracy Project to focus on ensuring that elections in the U.S. remain free and fair. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation. He recently wrote a guest essay in The New York Times entitled “No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts with Donald Trump.” He is the author of Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It He co-founded the Election Law Listserv in 1995 and founded the Election Law Blog in 2003 to share news and analysis of election law issues. In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights and served as a CNN election law analyst.
Chris Mosley ’91 joined Foley Hoag as a partner and will work remotely from Denver. Mosley will specialize in representing policyholders in disputes with insurers and will join the firm’s insurance recovery practice within its litigation department.
Jacqueline Nguyen ‘91 administered the oath of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to UCLA Law grads at the UCLA School of Law Bar Admission Ceremony in December 2021.
Mary-Christine “M.C.” Sungaila ’91 launched The Portia Project, a weekly podcast in which she will interview high-achieving women in the field of law in hopes of inspiring the next generation. The four initial podcasts feature conversations with Christine Durham, retired chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court; Karen Scott, U.S. magistrate judge for the Central District of California; Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michelle Williams and West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth D. Walker. Sungaila is the head of Buchalter’s appellate practice group and a shareholder in the firm’s Orange County office.
Greg Zipes ‘91 recently published the book Justice and Faith: The Frank Murphy Story, a biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy. It has won a Michigan State History Prize. Justice Murphy was most famous for condemning as racist the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Ruth Bermudez Montenegro ’92 was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a U.S. District Court judge. She was nominated by President Joseph Biden and confirmed to a lifetime appointment to the San Diego federal bench. Magistrate Judge Montenegro is the second Latina among the 61 District Court judges in the state of California.
Bob Offer ’92 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Offer is a founding partner at Sloane Offer Weber & Dern.
Eugene Volokh ’92 celebrated the 20-year anniversary of his blog The Volokh Conspiracy Hosted by Reason Magazine, the blog chiefly features law professors and one political science professor. Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law.
David Byrnes ’93 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s list “Top Music Lawyers of 2022.” Byrnes is a partner at Ziffren Brittenham.
Toby Dorsey ’93 was promoted to deputy general counsel in the Office of Administration, Executive Office of the President at the White House. Dorsey is a national and international expert on making policy, legislation and rules, having solved legal problems for the White House, Congress and the federal courts.
David Eisman ’93 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Eisman, a partner at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, is head of the firm’s Entertainment Group and leader of the Mergers and Acquisitions/Corporate Group in the Los Angeles office.
Jeffrey Freedman ‘93 was appointed chief administration officer at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). He will maintain oversight of CAA’s global legal, human resources, information technology and real estate areas. Freedman will also continue to serve as general counsel. He joined CAA from Paramount Pictures, where he served as executive vice president of business affairs and operations.
Scott Burton ’94 joined Norton Rose Fulbright as a partner in its Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., offices.
Burton’s practice focuses on environmental regulation and government affairs. Joining from Hunton Andrews Kurth, Burton leverages his extensive environmental, energy and natural resources experience to advise clients in the national and international public policy arenas on a range of high-profile and high-risk issues.
Kevin Davis ’94 was named to the board of directors of Adai (Active Design Advisors, Inc.), an affiliate of the Center for Active Design (CfAD). Adai is a new business unit of CfAD, which operates the Fitwel healthy building certification system. Davis is the CEO of JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group, Americas, where his responsibilities include investment sales, debt and equity placement, and asset management. He was also named to the advisory board of the Cornell Center for Real Estate and Finance in 2021.
Elia Gallardo ’94 was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom as deputy director of Legislative and Governmental Affairs at the California Department of Health Care Access and Information. Gallardo has been director of Government Affairs at the County Behavioral Health Directors Association of California since 2019.
Michael Kalt ‘94 was selected for inclusion on the 2022 San Diego Super Lawyers list. Kalt, a partner in the Employment Law Practice Group of Wilson Turner Kosmo, was acknowledged for his employment litigation practice.
Adaora Udoji ’94 was named vice president of Programming & Operations at PBS.
Patrick Brown ’95 was appointed to Law360 ’s newly formed 2022 Banking Editorial Advisory Board. Brown, the managing partner at Sullivan & Cromwell’s Los Angeles office and a member of the firm’s General Practice Group, is also an advisory board member at the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law.
Kelly Cunningham ’95 joined Ervin Cohen & Jessup as a partner in its Intellectual Property and Technology Department. He specializes in patent, trademarks and copyright infringement litigation. Previously, Cunningham practiced at Cislo & Thomas.
Josh Meyer ’95 was promoted to executive vice president, head of Business Affairs at DreamWorks Animation. A six-year DreamWorks veteran, Meyer has a strong background in global film and television production, acquisition and distribution; consumer products licensing; and digital/ home entertainment production and distribution. Prior to DreamWorks Animation, Meyer served as general counsel and senior vice president of Business & Legal Affairs at Discovery/Hasbro’s joint venture cable television Hub Network.
Willie Hernández ‘96 has joined the Coca-Cola Company as general counsel, international. His new responsibilities will include providing legal support for multiple billion-dollar brands and beverage products in more than 200 countries and territories. Hernández was also elected to the board of directors of the Ronald McDonald House Charities Bay Area. Previously, Hernández was the head of legal for the Messenger division at Meta (Facebook), following executive positions with IBM, Amazon and Hewlett Packard.
Andrei Iancu ‘96 was named a Legal Visionary by the Los Angeles Times The recognition honors attorneys in California who have demonstrated noteworthy success and exemplary leadership during the past two years. The publication containing his profile is entitled ”Business of Law: Trends, Updates, Visionaries & In-House Counsel Leadership Awards.”
Janai Nelson ’96 was named the eighth president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). Nelson has also helped steward some of LDF’s most pivotal developments in the past seven years, including guiding the design and launching of one of the most far-reaching efforts to create the next generation of civil rights leaders—the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program.
Nedy Warren ‘96 has been promoted to vice president and chief operating officer at the Commerce Casino & Hotel. Previously, she served as Commerce Casino’s general counsel. Before working in the gaming industry, Warren represented small and large companies, assisting them with setting up their infrastructure, conducting training and investigations, providing advice and counsel, and litigating labor and employment-related matters.
John Yslas ’96 joined Wilshire Law Firm as a senior partner. He joins the growing Employment Class Actions and Complex Litigation Group and will handle select single plaintiff matters. Yslas was a partner for many years and held leadership roles at Foley & Lardner, Norton Rose Fulbright and Seyfarth Shaw.
Magdalena Reyes Bordeaux ’97 was sworn in as a bankruptcy judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
Halim Dhanidina ’97 joined Werksman Jackson & Quinn as a partner. The former appellate justice spent six years as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge and three years as a state appellate justice. Dhanidina was the first Muslim ever appointed appellate court judge in California. He retired from the bench in 2021 and will work out of the law firm’s downtown Los Angeles office.
Ilene Eskenazi ’97 was appointed to the board of directors of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp., a brand accelerator of direct-to-consumer fashion brands. Eskenazi currently serves as chief legal officer and corporate secretary for Petco Health and Wellness Company, where she oversees all legal, corporate governance and regulatory affairs in support of the company’s strategic plans and growth objectives.
Salvador Mendoza Jr. ’97 was confirmed by the Senate to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Judge Mendoza has served as a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Washington since 2014 and is the first Hispanic judge to serve on the 9th Circuit from Washington State.
Gretchen Rush ’97 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Rush is a named partner at Hansen Jacobson Teller Hoberman Newman Warren Richman Rush Kaller Gellman Meigs & Fox.
Cheryl Snow ’97 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Snow is a partner at Gang Tyre Ramer Brown & Passman.
Lorena Gonzalez ‘98 left the California Assembly to lead the California Labor Federation.
Mark Lamb ’98 joined Carney Badley Spellman, P.S., as a principal. His legal practice centers on three primary areas: real estate and land use, business transactions and litigation, and government affairs, campaign finance and election law. Lamb was mayor of Bothell, Washington, for four terms and served on the Bothell City Council from 2004 to 2015.
Minh Merchant ’98 joined Aspira Women’s Health as general counsel and corporate secretary.
Felicia Chang ’99 joined Westmount Asset Management as director of Wealth Strategy. She joins Westmount from Wells Fargo Private Bank and has more than 20 years of experience in trust and estate planning.
Angel Tang Nakamura ’99 was named to the 2022 “Women of Influence: Attorneys” list by the Los Angeles Business Journal Nakamura is a Product Liability and Mass Tort partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. Her practice focuses on the management of complex, multiparty litigation, including class actions and multidistrict litigation.
Jason Pu ’99 was appointed the regional administrator of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Region 9, by President Joseph Biden.
Fred Slaughter ‘99 was confirmed as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He was nominated to fill the seat vacated by retired Judge Andrew Guilford ’75. His chambers will be in Santa Ana, and he will be the first Black federal judge in Orange County history.
Lilit Asadourian ’00 joined Barnes & Thornburg’s Los Angeles office as a partner in the Litigation Department, where she will practice in the firm’s Insurance Recovery and Counseling group. She has more than two decades of litigation experience and previously served as legal counsel for Fifth Third Bank and Bank of America.
Loan Dang ’00 was made a named partner at Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bobb & Dang.
Chris M. Kwok ’00 served on Alvin Bragg’s transition committee as Bragg prepared to become Manhattan discrict attorney in New York.
Andrew Merickel ‘00 was named head of Knobbe Martens’ San Francisco office. The managing partner specializes in patents, including building patent portfolios and navigating patent issues in the technology field.
Camille Carey ‘01 has been named dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law.
Cara Horowitz ’01 was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article entitled “Supreme Court Rules for Coal-Producing States, Limits EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change.” She was also quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fortune, and The Washington Post Horowitz is the coexecutive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law and the co-director of UCLA’s Environmental Law Clinic.
Allen Seto ‘01 was appointed chief legal officer of FinancialForce.
Betsy Tucci ’01 joined Minerva Project as general counsel and chief administrative officer. She will oversee all legal, finance and people functions. Tucci was previously general counsel and company secretary of InStride.
Bijan Esfandiari ’02 has been promoted to the board of directors of Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. He has also risen from firm shareholder to senior shareholder. Esfandiari works as a pharmaceutical product liability attorney at Baum Hedlund.
Ana Damonte ’01 joined Martin Marietta Materials, Inc., as assistant general counsel.
Jeff Diener ’01 joined BakerHostetler as a partner in its Business Practice Group. Based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Diener will be a member of the Real Estate team and will co-lead the national Hospitality Industry team.
Chad Fitzgerald ’01 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Fitzgerald, a partner at Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump Holley, specializes in complex entertainment industry disputes, as well as business and intellectual property litigation.
Lev Ginsburg ’02 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Ginsburg is a founding partner at Ginsburg Daniels Kallis.
Johanna Schiavoni ’02 was honored with a Bernard E. Witkin Award for Excellence in the Practice of Law and was recognized as a Community Changemaker by the San Diego Law Library Foundation. The award recognized Schiavoni’s achievements in appellate practice, as well as her extensive community service, including a term in 2021 as chair of the board of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, and as the 2020 president of the San Diego County Bar Association.
Waiyi Tse ’02 was selected for inclusion in the “Outstanding Women in Business” list by the Triad Business Journal Tse is the chief of staff at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She was recognized for her work during the pandemic and for numerous contributions to the university.
Diego Cartagena ’03 was appointed to the California Access to Justice Commission.
Hailyn Chen ’03, a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, will take the lead in an external investigation into allegations that women’s swim head coach Teri McKeever at the University of California, Berkeley, bullied and verbally abused more than 20 current and former Golden Bears athletes. Chen was one of the first female coxswains for the Yale varsity crew team and was named the program’s MVP in 1996.
Andrew Kendall ’03 was appointed to serve as a judge on the Kern County Superior Court.
Susan Schalla ’03 has been elected to the board of directors and she was made director of associates at Carney Badley Spellman, P.S., in Seattle.
Daniel A. Dingerson ‘04 was promoted to counsel at Davis+Gilbert.
Michael Kurzer ’04 joined Vinson & Elkins as a partner in its New York office. He will add his experience to the firm’s Technology Transactions and Intellectual Property practice. Before becoming an attorney, Kurzer worked as a product engineer for Hewlett-Packard.
Marc Lewis ’04, who founded Lewis & Llewellyn in 2012 with Paul Llewellyn, celebrated his firm’s 10th anniversary. The Northern California firm now has 16 attorneys and has recently expanded into Southern California. It was selected by The National Law Journal (NLJ) to its 2022 list of Plaintiffs’
Attorneys Trailblazers. The NLJ selected 50 plaintiffs’ attorneys across the United States whom it characterized as “truly agents of change.” In selecting the firm for this honor, the NLJ recognized the firm’s groundbreaking work in bringing civil lawsuits on behalf of survivors of sexual abuse.
Cheryl Lott ’04 joined the UCLA Foundation Board of Directors and assumed her new post on July 1. She is a former president of the UCLA Alumni Association and alumni regent to the UC Board of Regents and serves on the UCLA Foundation’s audit and nominations and governance committees. Lott is a member of the UCLA School of Law alumni board and is a founding member of the board of UCLA Law Women LEAD. She is a shareholder at Buchalter, and her practice focuses on general business and commercial litigation, as well as labor and employment litigation.
Kamran Mirrafati ’04 rejoined Seyfarth Shaw as a partner.
Shawn Westrick ’04 became in-house counsel for crypto company Stakefish, the leading staking service provider for blockchain projects.
David Ambroz ’05 was appointed to the Equality California and Equality California Institute Board of Directors.
Ambroz is the head of External Affairs and Community Engagement for the West and Inland Empire at Amazon.com. He previously served as the executive director, Corporate Social Responsibility, for Walt Disney Television.
Michael A. Brown ’05 has been recognized by The American Lawyer as Dealmaker of the Year for his work representing Coinbase in its pioneering direct listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. This award honors practitioners across the U.S. who have played a pivotal role in the year’s most notable and innovative transactions.
Brown is a partner in the corporate practice group at Fenwick & West.
Julie Goldstein ‘05 was named president of the Bucks County Bar Association in Pennsylvania.
Nathan Jackson ’05 was promoted to associate general counsel at Amazon.com.
Ahmand Johnson ’05 joined Greenspoon Marder as a partner in the Entertainment & Sports practice group in the firm’s Miami office. Johnson represents entertainers, athletes and companies in transactional matters, as well as both companies and individuals in high-stakes commercial litigation. He also represents artists, record companies, songwriters, producers and production companies regarding copyrights, licensing, financing, content acquisition, production, digital distribution and music. Previously, he was at Diaz Reus and Shutts & Bowen.
Rory Miller ’05 joined Locke Lorde as a partner and will serve as head of Private Equity Litigation for California.
Danny Passman ’05 was named to The Hollywood Reporter ’s “Power Lawyers 2022: Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” Passman is a partner at Gang Tyre Ramer Brown & Passman.
Eric Scarazzo ‘05 became a partner at Gibson Dunn.
Joshua Schneiderman ’05 was selected for inclusion in the Los Angeles Business Journal ’s “2021 Leaders of Influence: Thriving in Their 40s.” This list recognizes leading professionals in Los Angeles in their 40s, along with some details about their careers, attributes, and accomplishments.
Jerry Yang ’05 was appointed to serve as a judge in the Riverside County Superior Court by Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously, Yang served as chief of the Riverside Office at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, as a deputy chief of the Riverside Office, and as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Nathaniel Bach ’06 joined Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in the firm’s Century City office as an Entertainment Litigation partner.
Nikki Buffa ’06 has been promoted to partner at Latham & Watkins. She is a member of the Environment, Land & Resources Practice in the Corporate Department.
Jennifer Grock ’06 joined Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo as a partner.
Gabrielle Rabinovitch ’06 was appointed as interim CFO of PayPal. Before she took on the position, she was PayPal’s senior vice president of corporate finance and investor relations. Previously, she spent four years as vice president of the corporate financial planning and analysis team for Williams-Sonoma and led its investor relations program.
Kristin Peer ‘07 was appointed to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation Board of Directors by Governor Gavin Newsom. Peer has specialized in water law and policy at Bartkiewicz Kronick & Shanahan since early 2022. She was deputy secretary and special counsel for Water Policy at the California Environmental Protection Agency from 2019 to 2022 and assistant general counsel there from 2015 to 2019.
Steven E. Hurdle Jr. ’06 joined Willkie Farr & Gallagher as a partner in its Los Angeles office. Hurdle Jr., who spent 12 years at Loeb & Loeb, joins the Willkie corporate and financial services department and the entertainment transactions practice. He specializes in sophisticated transactions for clients in media, entertainment and technology.
Robbie Hurwitz ’06 has been hired as the general counsel of Hermeus, a venture-backed startup with the long-term vision of transforming the global human transportation network with Mach 5 aircrafts.
Neil Peretz ’06 was interviewed on Law360 Pulse He is the chief legal officer at Sawa Credit Inc. in San Francisco, which aims to help the disadvantaged build toward homeownership. Peretz is also the managing partner at Enumero Law, where he advises financial technology companies.
Michael Pulos ’06 was appointed as a judge on the San Diego County Superior Court.
Jason Breen ’07 joined Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati as a partner in its Los Angeles office. He is a mergers and acquisitions expert and primarily handles M&A deals for clients in the life sciences sector; he also works with technology companies in areas including software, media, and consumer products. Breen was previously at Goodwin Procter.
Andrew Brunsden ‘07 was named general counsel and deputy commissioner of Legal Affairs at the New York City Department of Investigation, the city’s independent anti-corruption and oversight agency.
Rebecca Cohen ’07 was appointed general counsel at Centre Consortium. She will oversee and advise Centre on legal strategy as the consortium continues to set standards for the blockchain industry. Previously, Cohen served as general counsel for the values-driven public safety platform Mark43 and associate general counsel for digital currency protocol Worldcoin.
Briana Hill ‘07 was listed in Variety ’s “Dealmakers Impact Report 2021: Top Negotiators Behind Mega Deals.” Hill is a partner and Entertainment Group co-chair at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard.
Taisuke Kimoto ’07 joined Covington & Burling as a partner and co-head of the firm’s Japan Initiative.
Adrianne Marshack ‘07 has been appointed to serve as a judge in the Orange County Superior Court by Governor Gavin Newsom. Marshack has been a partner at both Goodwin Procter and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
Paul Seeley ’07 was promoted to partner at Sheppard Mullin. He is a member of the firm’s business trial practice group and is based in the Los Angeles office.
Jennifer Yoo ’07 joined Fenwick & West as a partner in the corporate regulatory practice group in the firm’s Santa Monica office. Previously, Yoo spent more than 14 years at Latham & Watkins.
Liza Brereton ‘08 became a partner at Turner Dhillon.
Christopher Moore ’08 joined Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as a partner. Moore, who works with technology and life sciences companies, represented business software maker Oracle Corp. in its $28.3 billion acquisition of health care IT company Cerner Corp. Previously, he served as managing partner of the Silicon Valley office of Hogan Lovells.
Tim Reed ‘08 rejoined Ogletree Deakins in its San Francisco office as a shareholder. Reed was previously a member of Ogletree Deakins’s San Francisco office, from 2013 to 2016. Most recently, he was at FordHarrison, where he was the office’s managing partner and co-founder of FordHarrison’s San Francisco Bay Area office. Reed was featured in the “2021 Black Leaders Worth Watching” issue of Profiles in Diversity Journal
Almuhtada Smith ‘08 was featured in an article in Ebony entitled “6 Tips for Black Entrepreneurs Looking for Startup Funding.” Smith is the founder and principal at ARS IP Law Firm.
Moises Ceja ’09 was nominated by Oregon governor Kate Brown and confirmed by the state’s Senate to serve as a board member of the Oregon Workers’ Compensation Board. Ceja will serve as a legal reviewer of administrative law judge workers’ compensation orders that are appealed.
Eunice Chay ’09 was featured in and interviewed for “Leading the Way Forward: Women in Secured Finance Profiles.” Chay is a corporate associate in the Los Angeles office of Winston & Strawn and a member of the Community Outreach Committee of the Women in Securitization initiative of the Structured Finance Association.
Ryan Erickson ’09 was selected by The National Law Journal (NLJ) to its 2022 list of 50 “Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Trailblazers.” The NLJ selected attorneys across the United States whom it characterized as “truly agents of change.” Erickson is a partner at Lewis & Llewellyn in its San Francisco office.
Leah Goodridge ’09 was featured on Law360 about her new role on the New York City Planning Commission. Goodridge was appointed to the commission in 2021 and is its only tenant lawyer. She is also a managing attorney at Mobilization for Justice.
Chris Kolosov ’09 joined Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton as a partner on the Energy, Infrastructure and Project Finance industry team. Kolosov will be based in the Los Angeles office. She joins with three other partners from Winston & Strawn.
Jesse Levin ’09 was promoted to partner at Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro.
Katie Viggiani ‘09 has been elected a partner at Morrison Foerster.
Ran Ben-Tzur ’10 has been recognized by The American Lawyer as “Dealmaker of the Year” for his work representing Coinbase in its pioneering direct listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. This award honors practitioners across the U.S. who have played a pivotal role in the year’s most notable and innovative transactions. Ben-Tzur is a partner in the corporate practice group at Fenwick & West.
Sarah-Eve Pelletier ’10 was named the first sports integrity commissioner by the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada. As the first head of Canada’s safe sport program, Pelletier and her office will field complaints about violations within Canadian sports. Pelletier currently works as the Canadian Olympic Committee’s director of Sport Business and Sustainability. Previously, she was on Canada’s national team in artistic swimming.
Kate Sheets ’10 was promoted to the newly formed position of senior vice president of Strategy and Business Affairs at AEG Global Partnerships. Most recently, she served as vice president, legal counsel, for AEG. Sheets will lead efforts to identify, cultivate and refine key partnerships and strategic initiatives, ensuring that they contribute to the overall growth targets and priorities of AEG Global Partnerships.
Cindy Villanueva ’10 was elected vice president of the 2022 Los Abogados Board of Directors. Los Abogados is Arizona’s Hispanic Bar Association.
Az Virji ’10 was promoted to general counsel of Marlin Equity Partners.
Matthew DellaBetta ’11 joined Kelley | Uustal as a trial attorney. DellaBetta, a former federal and state prosecutor, served as the deputy chief of the Violent Crimes and Gangs section for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Maryland.
Cassandra Gaedt-Sheckter ‘11 was made a partner at Gibson Dunn.
Kendall Johnson ‘11 was named one of “Hollywood’s New Leaders of 2021” by Variety
Antonio Kizzie ’11 joined Snell & Wilmer as an associate in its Los Angeles office. He is a litigation, trial and appellate attorney and was selected to join the American Board of Trial Advocates. Previously, he served as a volunteer deputy city attorney prosecuting DUIs for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, Metropolitan Branch.
Jason Lyon ’11 was elected to the Pasadena City Council. Lyon, who is a partner at Hahn & Hahn, will represent the city’s 7th District. Lyon is the first openly LGBTQ elected official in Pasadena history.
Jason Lueddeke ’11 was named to Billboard ’s 2022 class of Top Music Lawyers. Lueddeke is an associate at DLA Piper; his practice focuses on entertainment and media, sports, and technology.
Molly Madden ’11 was promoted to partner at Sklar Kirsh.
Harsh Parikh ’11 was promoted to partner at Nixon Peabody. Parikh focuses on health care and works in the firm’s Los Angeles office.
Michael Seiden ‘11 joined AHV Communities as general counsel and chief legal officer.
Nora Stilestein ’11 was promoted to partner at Sheppard Mullin. Stilestein is a member of the firm’s Labor and Employment practice group and is based in its Los Angeles office.
Scott Timpe ‘11 joined Sheppard Mullin as a partner. He is a member of the firm’s real estate, land use and environmental practice group as well as its health care industry team. Previously, Timpe was at Polsinelli.
Jessamyn Vedro ’11 was promoted to partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
Alicia Virani ’11 co-authored an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “The Monster of Incarceration Quietly Expands Through Ankle Monitors.” Virani is the Gilbert Foundation director of the Criminal Justice Program at UCLA School of Law. She is leading a new project: Overcoming (Claimed) Legal Barriers to Defunding the Police.
Josh Escovedo ‘12 has been named the No. 1 Trademarks author in JD Supra’s “2022 Readers’ Choice Awards.” He is an intellectual property, litigation and sports attorney at Weintraub Tobin and a shareholder and the leader of the firm’s Sports Law group.
Brad Greenberg ’12 joined National Public Radio’s policy team as legislative counsel after previously serving as assistant general counsel for the U.S. Copyright Office.
Linda Igarashi ’12 was promoted to partner at Sheppard Mullin. She is a member of the firm’s Corporate Practice Group and is based in its Orange County office.
Nathan Jackson ’12 was selected to Northern California Super Lawyers magazine’s 2022 “Rising Stars” list for his continued work on behalf of his clients and his dedication to the practice of law. Jackson is an associate at Liebert Cassidy Whitmore’s Sacramento office, where he provides counsel in labor and employment law.
Mike LaPlante ’12 joined Morrison & Foerster as a partner.
Tim Shimizu ’12 has been promoted to assistant city attorney for the City of Palo Alto.
Lauren van Schilfgaarde ’12 was quoted in an Axios article entitled “Indigenous Tribes Push Back on Calls to Open Abortion Clinics on Federal Lands.” She was also quoted by CNN, High Country News, Kaiser Health News, the Seattle Medium and the Salt Lake Tribune
Ryan Krueger ’13 was promoted to partner at Sheppard Mullin. Krueger is a member of the firm’s Labor and Employment Practice Group and is based in its Los Angeles office.
Abby Meyer ’13 was promoted to partner at Sheppard Mullin. Meyer is a member of the firm’s Business Trial Practice Group and the co-lead of the Food and Beverage Team. She is based in the firm’s Orange County office.
John Alexander ’14 joined Snell & Wilmer as a corporate and securities associate in its Orange County office. His practice is focused on advising clients on general corporate and litigation matters, as well as the formation, structuring and ongoing management of private and registered funds and regulatory and compliance-related matters.
John De La Merced ’14 was promoted to senior counsel at Stubbs Alderton & Markiles.
John Haney ‘14 shares stories of his Indigenous heritage in his podcast Beyond Stereotypes —B.S.ing He is a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and is an associate in Holland & Knight’s Labor, Employment and Benefits Group. He is also a member of the firm’s Native American Law Team and chair of its Native American Affinity Group.
David Hansen ’14 became a partner at Snell & Wilmer. Hansen concentrates his practice on defending companies against product liability, negligence, and general liability claims in state and federal courts that involve catastrophic injuries and wrongful death allegations.
Youdi Andy Pan ’14 was recognized as a Next Generation Partner in the Regulatory/ Compliance category of the Legal 500 Asia Pacific 2022 edition. Pan is a partner at YuandaWinston China Law Office in Shanghai.
Christopher Pasich ’14 was promoted to partner at Pasich, at its Los Angeles office. This is the first partner elevation since the firm’s founding.
David Crane ’15 joined the employment law firm Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete as an associate in its Los Angeles office. Previously, Crane was an associate at LTL Attorneys.
Katy Alimohammadi Crown ’15 was promoted to partner at Donaldson Callif Perez, an entertainment law firm based in Los Angeles. Crown specializes in representing filmmakers in all stages of their projects, including production legal services, rights clearance, and distribution.
Ivan Lu ’15 has been recognized as a Rising Leader in the 2022 Private Client Global Elite. Lu is an attorney in Butler Snow’s Singapore office in its Business Services Practice Group, with a focus on international tax and trust and estates.
Kelly Orians ‘15 joined the University of Virginia School of Law faculty as the director of the school’s new decarceration clinic.
Lindsey Shi ’15 was promoted to partner at Kirkland & Ellis.
Aurore Boussemard ’16 joined Franklin Templeton as corporate counsel.
Lee Kaplan ‘16 joined Crosbie Gliner Schiffman Southard & Swanson as an associate.
Cyrus Moshiri ’16 joined Fisher Phillips as an associate in its Irvine office.
Nick Warshaw ’16 is working for former California governor Gray Davis at Loeb and Loeb. Nick assists Governor Davis in providing strategic counsel to companies, nonprofits, research institutes and universities.
Lorien Giles ’18 joined the litigation team at Miller Nash’s Seattle office. Giles will provide creative and strategic guidance to the firm’s clients in all stages of litigation, from prelitigation guidance, discovery, depositions and decisive motions practice.
Caleb Jackson ’18 joined the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as public counsel. The organization was formed at the request of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to combat racial discrimination. Jackson will work primarily on voting rights issues.
Beth Kent ’18 co-authored a piece on the Legal Planet blog entitled “California Legislators Call for More Stringent Requirements for Oil and Gas.” She also provided testimony to the California Senate’s Labor, Public Employment & Retirement Committee to get Assembly Bill 2243 approved and sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Kent is an Emmett/Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law.
Kabita Parajuli ’18 was featured in an article entitled “Here’s why moving to Beijing to work as an in-house legal associate at AIIB is a career move worth taking” on the eFinancial Careers website that explained the particulars of being a legal associate for the Beijingbased Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Angela Reid ’18 joined Gibson Dunn & Crutcher as a commercial and employment litigation associate.
Ayan Jacobs ’19 joined employment law firm Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete as an associate in its Los Angeles office. Previously, Jacobs was an associate at Sanders Roberts.
Meha Raja ’19 joined Lewis & Llewellyn as an associate. Previously, Raja practiced at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. She primarily represents technology and financial services companies, in high-stakes, high-profile litigation.
Sarah Abeson ’20 joined Barnes & Thornburg in its Los Angeles office as an associate.
Jessica Griffith ‘20 authored a piece on copyright protections in the National Law Review Griffith is an associate at Proskauer Rose in the Litigation Department.
Francis Mascarenhas ‘20 joined Barnes & Thornburg as a corporate associate in its New York office.
Roz Sedaghat ’20 was named head of Legal and Business Affairs at Wavelength Film Production Company.
Alyson Tocicki ’20 authored a piece in the National Law Review entitled “Supreme Court Excuses Inadvertent Legal Errors in Copyright Applications.” Tocicki is an associate in the Litigation Department at Proskauer Rose.
Heather Dadashi ’21 authored a piece for the Legal Planet blog regarding NOx pollution. Dadashi is currently an Emmett/Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA Law for 2021–2023.
Sam Gillen ’21 joined Taft Stettinius & Hollister as an associate in the firm’s intellectual property practice group. Before joining Taft, Gillen served as a law clerk for the office of the Indiana attorney general in the Asset Recovery and Bankruptcy Litigation section.
Nikki Mahmoudi ’21 joined Weintraub Tobin as an associate in the Labor & Employment practice group.
Dana Ontiveros ’21 joined Snell & Wilmer as a corporate and securities associate in the firm’s Los Angeles office.
Austin Pegues ’21 joined Structure Law Group on its transactional team in its Los Angeles office.
Grace Carson ’22 was featured in an article on Targeted News Service about her goal to bring systems of restorative justice to tribal communities. Through the Skadden Foundation Fellowship, she will work with Native American tribes to develop restorative justice systems as an alternative to incarceration and punishment.
Michelle Edgar ’22 wrote an article for C-Suite Quarterly (CSQ)—“Creating a New Blueprint for Life—at Any Age.” It related how taking up running UCLA track and finishing UCLA Law at 40 gave her an empowering perspective. Before pursuing her master’s in legal studies, Edgar was an agent, recording executive, and manager at ICM Partners and Epic Records. Currently, she serves as head of Strategic Partnerships at LiveXLive Media.
Alton Wang ‘22 was elected to the governing board of the Pasadena Area Community College District. He represents Trustee Area 7, which includes parts of Temple City and Arcadia. Currently, Wang is a legal advocate for expanding voting rights and working toward fairer representation to guarantee that all Americans have equal access to their right to vote. Previously, he served as a policy adviser in Congress.
Milton B. Herring ’52
J. Perry Langford ’52
Sidney R. Kuperberg ’52
Donald C. Lozano ’53
Lloyd S. Wolf ’53
Stephen E. Lawton ’54
Gordon H. Pearce ’54
Martin R. Horn ’54
John A. Arguelles ’54
Edmond J. Russ ’54
Forrest Latiner ’55
Myrtle I. Dankers ’55
Charles E. Small ’56
John R. Hansen ’56
Florentino Garza ’56
David R. Glickman ’57
William H. Gustafson ’57
Joe Ling ’57
Morris Stone ’57
Robert R. Kirkpatrick ’57
Peter Shenas ’58
Willard D. Horwich ’58
Harold Bryman ’58
Gerald S. Barton ’58
Marvin L. Holen ’58
Ann M. Oustad ’59
Robert S. Canter ’59
Stanton P. Belland ’59
Leon A. Farley ’59
Michael Harris ’59
Daniel W. Fox ’60
Lawrence Kapiloff ’60
Joe Ingber ’60
Mark L. Lamken ’60
Jack L. Willis ’60
Donald M. Hoffman ’60
Earle J. Gibbons ’61
Mark E. Hurwitz ’61
J. Kenneth Jensen ’61
Hiroshi Fujisaki ’62
Eugene C. Treaster ’62
John S. Matthew ’63
Harvey W. Harper ’64
Dennis K. Hasty ’64
James L. Nolan ’64
Dennis A. Page ’64
Martin Wehrli ’64
William A. Ward ’64
David J. Epstein ’64
Richard A. Schulenberg ’65
Fred Selan ’65
Stanley R. Romain ’65
John A. Brevidoro ’66
John E. Lovejoy ’66
William G. Morrissey ’66
Bruce Augustus ’67
Mark L. Christiansen ’67
Michael A. Kaufman ’67
Leatrice L. Latts ’67
Michael A. Levin ’67
Michael A. Grayson ’67
Weldon P. Diggs ’68
Allen R. Adashek ’68
John W. Heinemann ’68
Michael L. Kossen ’69
Michael A. Levett ’69
Joseph S. Englert ’69
Linda S. Hume ’70
Jon S. Byrum ’70
Willard S. Anthony ’71
Steven A. Friedman ’71
Cornelio Q. Hernandez ’71
Steven R. Pingel ’71
Thomas R. Cory ’71
Glenn H. Angelo ’72
Charles H. Hack ’72
Andrew L. Krzemuski ’72
Alan A. Mangels ’72
Owen L. Kwong ’73
Robert A. Wooten ’73
James E. Gonzales ’74
Judith W. Wegner ’76
Ramon Gomez ’77
Terry D. Avchen ’77
Kenneth A. Kramarz ’78
Miriam J. Golbert ’78
Christopher O. Miller ’82
Thomas D. Lee ’82
Michael A. Mayhew ’82
Jeffrey A. Dinkin ’84
Charles F. Sayre ’86
Andres C. Serafica ’87
Perry S. Goldman ’87
Jamie L. Dubinsky ’87
Andrea N. Shomer-Left ’99
Jamie L. Stroops ’00
C. Hunter H. Hayes ’13
Former California Supreme Court Justice John A. Arguelles, a member of the Class of 1954, died at his home on April 10. He was 94.
Arguelles was the first UCLA Law alumnus to serve on the state’s highest court and only the second Hispanic justice on the court.
A highly regarded jurist, Arguelles was born in East Los Angeles in 1927. As many children did during the Great Depression, he held odd jobs, including selling newspapers on a street corner, to earn money to help support his family. He later went to Garfield High School, where a quote from President Garfield inscribed along the school’s proscenium archway made a deep impression on him.
As Arguelles recalled in an interview with UCLA Law students, “The inscription read, ‘There is no American youth, however poor, however humble, orphaned though he may be, who may not rise through all of the grades of society and become the crown, the glory, the pillar of his state, provided he have a clear head, a true heart and a strong arm.’
“It’s a wonderful quote,” he said, “and I tried all my life to live by it.”
After graduating from high school in 1945, Arguelles served in the U.S. Navy. Soon after his honorable discharge, he was able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to become a double Bruin, first earning a B.A. in economics from UCLA and then enrolling in one of UCLA Law’s earliest classes.
Arguelles was admitted to the State Bar in January 1955 and set up a private practice in East Los Angeles. In 1957, he was a founding member of the Mexican American Bar Association of Los Angeles.
His early days of practice were difficult, but Arguelles considered them the root of his later professional success.
“If a client could afford it,” said Arguelles, “they’d go to a big firm downtown. If you were blue collar, you’d go to someone more affordable. And if you were really hard up, you’d probably go to someone like me!
“But I was very fortunate,” he continued. “I wound up representing two state associations before the state legislature—the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association and the California Association of Podiatrists. As a result, I made appearances in Sacramento before legislative committees of both the Senate and the Assembly, and those connections attracted the attention of the California attorney general Pat Brown.”
It was those connections, and his success as a solo practitioner and a member of the City Council in Montebello, that led to his appointment to serve as a judge of the East Los Angeles Municipal Court by then-Governor Brown.
Arguelles quickly earned a reputation for his steady disposition, evenhanded approach to trials and sentencing, and the highly
efficient administration of his courtroom. Attorneys described him as courteous and gentlemanly and gave him the nickname “the Cardinal.”
He was also known as a thoughtful counselor to community leaders and political figures on both sides of the aisle. These qualities led to a judicial career that thrived under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In 1969, after six years on the municipal court, Arguelles was appointed by Governor Ronald Reagan to serve as a judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, a seat he held for 15 years, after which Governor George Deukmejian elevated him to associate justice of the California Court of Appeal.
And finally, he was named by Governor Deukmejian as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court and began his term in March 1987.
After retiring from the bench in 1989, Arguelles became Of Counsel for the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and served as an arbitrator and mediator.
Along with his jurisprudence, Arguelles’s professional legacy includes his leadership of commissions formed to address crucial problems in policing and access to justice. The first of these commissions was a blue-ribbon committee of judges and other legal figures convened to study the language needs of non-Englishspeaking persons that confront the California legal system. The
recommendations of the commission were adopted, and California became, and remains to this day, a model state for interpreter and language access in the civil and criminal justice system, with court interpreters available for spoken languages such as Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Punjabi, Russian, Arabic, Farsi and Tagalog, and more than 50 court-certified and trained sign language interpreters.
“That report was the capstone in Justice Arguelles’s cathedral,” says Judge Manuel Ramirez, the presiding justice of the California Court of Appeal, 4th District, and one of many later Mexican American judges who have regarded Arguelles as a personal mentor and a pathbreaker for their own careers. “What a remarkable man. A unique and elegant human being.”
In 1991, Arguelles served alongside Warren Christopher on the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, formed by Mayor Tom Bradley in the wake of the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. The commission was created to conduct a full and fair examination of the structure and operation of
the LAPD, including its recruitment and training practices, internal disciplinary system, and citizen complaint system.
Arguelles was honored twice by his alma mater, with the 1987 UCLA School of Law Alumnus of the Year award, and in 1989, with UCLA’s Professional Achievement Award. In 2003, Arguelles was named Judge of the Year by the Orange County Hispanic Bar Association.
Arguelles was preceded in death by his wife of 58 years, Martha. He is survived by his daughter Jeanine Arguelles; son and daughterin-law, Evan and Kathy Arguelles; and daughter Andrea Arguelles. He is also survived by four grandchildren and a great-grandson.
In his final interview with UCLA Law, Arguelles expressed gratitude to the school for establishing a scholarship in his name. “This gives me an opportunity to thank the taxpayers of California and the institution of UCLA for enabling me to have that wonderful education,” he said. “I owe everything to that education, and I couldn’t have done it without them.”
Long before he gave a gift to the UCLA School of Law in a historic act of generosity that led to the naming of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy in his honor, David Epstein stood out among the law school’s stellar alumni for his excellence in service, practice, philanthropy and engagement.
A distinguished member of the UCLA Law Class of 1964, Epstein—who died on Dec. 9, 2021, at age 82, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease— excelled across the landscapes of legal practice, sports, and entrepreneurship.
In the Los Angeles Times obituary, Epstein’s family recalled “an excellent athlete and a serious sports fan.” He was a champion runner and passionate golfer who would go on to represent top athletes, including the boxer Ken Norton and the NFL star Eric Dickerson as an attorney.
Epstein, also an expert practitioner in the field of unclaimed property, wrote the authoritative volume Escheat and Abandoned Property Laws: Survey and Analysis and, in 1984, founded the Unclaimed Property Clearinghouse. The clearinghouse audited businesses on behalf of states for unclaimed funds owed to others, generating windfalls: California increased its collection of unclaimed property from $2 million to more than $100 million a year.
Through the decades, Epstein was dedicated to his alma mater, serving on the UCLA Law Board of Advisors and, in 2007, earning recognition as one of the law school’s Alumni of the Year.
That year his gift of $5 million was the greatest sum that a living alum had ever presented to UCLA Law. To mark his generosity, UCLA Law named its leading public interest program—which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary—in his honor.
“David was passionate about making sure that ordinary people got their due and that corporations and institutions treated them with dignity and fairness,” says former UCLA Law Dean Jennifer L. Mnookin. “His commitment to our school and our students, through his support of the program in public interest law and policy, was as farsighted as it was generous.”
The Epstein Program features a specialized curriculum that develops well-rounded public interest advocates who work on a broad range of issues, as well as community building, in collaboration with faculty, alumni, and community partners. It is nationally recognized for its unique training program and is highly sought after by aspiring public interest lawyers: Last year the program received a record 1,100 applications for 25 spots.
Karin Wang, the executive director of the program, says, “Through his generous support, David leaves behind a remarkable legacy. Not only has his gift impacted hundreds of dedicated public interest alumni and students but, perhaps more importantly, it will benefit generations to come, through the work of Epstein Program graduates who advocate for the most vulnerable in our community and on the most pressing issues of justice and equality.”
Epstein is survived by his wife, Jane; his son, Matthew ’98; and his twin brother, Dan.
UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW OFFICE OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
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