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IN THE ARENA: THE TRIAL ADVOCACY PROGRAM BUILDS
by UCLA Law
IN THE ARENA
UCLA Law’s Trial Advocacy Program builds lawyers— and wins competitions
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.
—A CULTURE OF WINNING 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.”
AND A CULTURE OF LEARNING 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.”
—BRITTNEE BUI ’20
Justin Bernstein, Director of the A. Barry Cappello Program in Trial Advocacy
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.”
EMPHASIZING TEAMWORK 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.”
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!”
REPUTATION AND RECRUITING “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.”
Alumni coaches welcome chance to give back and stay involved
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.”
Cheryl Harris, Justin Bernstein receive distinguished teaching award
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.
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 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).
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.
“The support that Professor Bernstein received for this award underscored his 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 a genuinely transformative experience that has shaped their sense of what is possible.”
Acclaimed new Carbado books focus on race and the law
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 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
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 Devon Carbado 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.” 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
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.”
L to R: Blake Emerson, Laura Gómez and Aaron Littman received awards from the Association of American Law Schools.
AALS RECOGNITION:
Gómez, Littman and Emerson honored
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.
James Park book Q&A: A history of securities fraud
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 on 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 in 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 months, 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.
James Park
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.
How does the valuation treadmill lead to fraud?
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.
Laura Gómez named to advisory committee of new Smithsonian museum
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 Gómez
From left to right: Jill Horwitz; Lindsay Wiley
“A big tent”: UCLA’s new Health Law and Policy Program offers diverse expertise
Over 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.
New initiatives
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.
Students benefit from mentorship
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.
