Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Bio

Shaun Ossei-Owusu LPS’08 is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. He has held fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California.

His work sits at the intersection of law, history, and sociology and focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide protections and benefits to poor people and racial minorities. He also works on stratification in legal education and the legal profession. At Penn he teaches courses in the areas of criminal law, professional responsibility, antidiscrimination law, social welfare law, and the business of law.

He has received awards from social science and humanities organizations such as the American Bar Foundation, American Society for Criminology, American Society for Legal History, the New America Foundation, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, New York University Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and the American Journal of Law & Medicine, among other outlets. His public writing has appeared in Slate, Bloomberg Law, Boston Review, ABA Journal, American Prospect, Jacobin, Public Books, and Salon.

His first book project, Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System, was published by W.W. Norton in 2026. His second book project, Steps Toward Equality: A Multiracial History of Legal Organizing, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2027.

He received his PhD from the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and his JD from Berkeley Law. He previously practiced litigation and healthcare enforcement law at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C., and worked as a Loaned Associate focusing on public benefits appeals with the Barbara McDowell Appellate Advocacy Project at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. He is a proud Bronx-born native.

Education

• UC Berkeley
  Ph.D., Department of African American Studies

• UC Berkeley
  J.D.