UC Law SF faculty are leading the charge to advance racial equity through legal scholarship and education

Thalia González writes at the interdisciplinary nexus of education, health, and race. She interrogates an underexamined, yet widespread, driver of racialized and gendered health inequities—school discipline and school policing—in several recent articles. Two articles co-authored with Alexis Etow & Cesar De La Vega, An Antiracist Health Equity Agenda for Education and A Health Justice Response to School Discipline and Policing, define the essential elements of an anti-racist health equity approach to education and analyze the negative individual and community health effects of school discipline and school policing. González’s article (with Donna Coker), A Call for an Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach to Addressing the Criminalization of Black Girls, challenges the school-based restorative justice movement to dismantle harmful norms in schools, confront intersectional oppression, and prioritize the resilience and wellbeing of Black girls. Her article (with Paige Joki), Discipline Outside the Schoolhouse Doors: Anti-Black Racism and the Exclusion of Black Caregivers, calls upon the civil rights and education justice communities to expand their vision of school discipline law and policy reform to include the often ignored, yet deeply impacted lives of parents, caregivers, and families. In Race, Public Health, and the Epidemic of Incarceration, González turns her lens on the mass incarceration system, arguing (with Emma Kaeser) for an expanded view of anti-racist, health-centered carceral reforms.
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Veena Dubal’s research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. In her recent article, The New Racial Wage Code, she makes visible the racial politics of worker protection for on-demand platform workers. Platform industrialists have proffered a new regulatory category for the on-demand platform worker—neither employee nor independent contractor—that limits the protections available to the workforce, legalizes unpredictable, digitally-personalized piece-pay, and constricts a worker’s right to negotiate different terms. Dubal situates the on-demand platform worker category within a genealogy of industry-sponsored racial wage codes, proposals, and debates during the First and Second New Deals. She argues that facially neutral employment and labor rights carve-outs for the gig workforce are made possible by and reproduce racial subjugation.

Ming H. Chen brings critical race perspectives to her scholarship on immigration and administrative law. She wrote an epilogue for her book Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era, reflecting on the prospects for citizenship policy reform brought by the global pandemic. She published two symposium articles on political representation in Asian and Latinx communities for NYU Law Review and the University of Colorado Law Review. Chen gave a public lecture in the Penn Race and Regulation Series on political representation, the census, and noncitizen voting (available as a podcast). She delivered the inaugural lecture for the R.F. Harney Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto based on her forthcoming article, Colorblind Nationalism and the Limits of Citizenship, which describes Constitutional and statutory barriers to remedying discrimination against Asian Americans and Latinx persons perceived to be foreign. She recently launched and currently directs UC Hastings’ new Center on Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality.

Alina Ball’s article, Transactional Community Lawyering, was recently published in the Temple Law Review. The article defines and examines “transactional community lawyering”—the intentional application of community lawyering theory into a distinctly transactional practice. She draws on her experiences representing Latinx farmworkers in their quest for safe drinking water in rural California to provide a narrative for transactional community lawyering in practice. Her current research project explores the development of business law doctrine in the context of racial capitalism. Her forthcoming essay in the UC Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly urges transactional lawyers to gain a deeper understanding of the Greenwood District given the Tulsa Race Massacre centennial and Movement for Black Lives.

Jennifer Oliva’s research interests include health law and policy, privacy law, evidence, torts, and complex litigation. Her recent article, The Influence of White Exceptionalism on Drug War Discourse (with Taleed El-Sabawi), traces the War on Drugs to the nation’s first opiate crisis in the late 1800s, when the strategy was used to further subordinate Black persons and other persons of color. In Dosing Discrimination: Regulating PDMP Risk Scores, Oliva demonstrates how algorithms used to generate risk scores in Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP) perpetuate discrimination against women and racial minorities with complex, pain-related conditions. She argues that the FDA should regulate PDMP risk scoring software to ensure that such predictive diagnostic tools are safe and effective for all patients.

The Center for Racial and Economic Justice (CREJ), co-directed by Professors Shauna Marshall and Alina Ball, works to advance equity through legal education, scholarship and collaboration. CREJ enriches UC Hastings Law by providing our intellectual community with access to nationally renowned thinkers on issues of racial and economic inequality and the space to critically examine how the law reinforces subordination. CREJ programming this past year included a symposium, Connecting the Threads that Bind: Contextualizing Legalized Violence Against Asian Americans, to investigate systemic and historic causes of anti-AAPI violence; and the Inaugural Justice Wiley W. Manuel Lecture, delivered by Russell Robinson, on How Race Should Matter in Intimate Relationships. This year, Prithika Balakrishnan joins UC Hastings and CREJ as the C. Keith Wingate Visiting Assistant Professor to teach, among other courses, the Criminal Practice Clinic, and Scott Cummings joins the team as the Wiley Manuel Visiting Scholar to teach a seminar on Law, Race, and Economic Justice in the City.