Criminal Law Scholarship
Criminal Law Scholarship and Impact
UC Law SF faculty are leading voices on a range of issues, including criminal justice, civil rights, the structural disparities and inequalities in the criminal justice system, as well as the intersections of criminal law with health and behavioral science.
Recent News | Selected Scholarship | Faculty
Recent News
New Faculty
Kate Weisburd joins our faculty as professor of law from George Washington University, where students voted her professor of the year in 2023 and 2024. Weisburd’s widely published research has appeared in the Virginia, California, and UCLA law reviews, and has won multiple peer-conferred awards.
Prithika Balakrishnan joins our faculty as associate professor of law and was previously the C. Keith Wingate Visiting Professor at UC Law San Francisco. She has been a federal public defender, union organizer, and Peace Corps volunteer. Balakrishnan’s first article just appeared in the UCLA Law Review.
Benjamin A. Barsky joins us as associate professor of law from Harvard University, where he was an annual fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and an initiative fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Barsky’s research focuses on the public health effects of criminal law enforcement, and his articles have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, Washington Law Review, and New England Journal of Medicine.
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Professors’ Arguments Cited in SCOTUS Expert Testimony Case
Three UC Law SF professors played an important role in Diaz v. United States, a U.S. Supreme Court case testing the limits of expert testimony in criminal trials.
The case considered whether experts can opine on a defendant’s likely mental state. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned a concurring opinion, citing arguments co-written by UC Law SF’s Professor Emily Murphy and Professor of Practice, Matt Coles, along with Professor Teneille Brown, of the University of Utah.
Murphy and Coles filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of more than 20 evidence law professors, including UC Law SF Chancellor & Dean David Faigman, arguing that experts can offer important “framework” evidence on the likelihood of a fact being true.
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Professor Jon Abel Wins Award for Criminal Justice Research
In recognition of his groundbreaking research on issues affecting the criminal justice system, Jon Abel, associate professor of law, was awarded the UC Law SF Foundation Faculty Award for scholarly excellence and promise in 2023. The annual award provides an outstanding researcher with a $7,500 prize to support faculty research costs and is funded by the UC Law SF Foundation Board of Trustees.
Abel’s most recent project examined data from criminal case files sourced from the Bay Area’s Alameda County to test prominent theories about the “federalization” of crime. His analysis exposed the structural biases that impede data collection of state court records, which in turn, limits scholarly research examining the state system.
Jodi Short, associate dean for research and selection committee member, stated that Abel’s efforts “have yielded novel insights into the criminal justice system that have been widely cited in scholarly journals, newspapers, and court cases.”
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In 2020, as the pandemic began, Hadar Aviram began hearing traumatic stories about the inhumane conditions in California’s prisons. Her advocacy and investigations, with co-author Chad Goerzen, turned into Fester: Carceral Permeability and California’s COVID-19 Correctional Disaster (University of California Press, 2024). The book chronicles the events as they unfolded and explains how they challenge conventional understandings of the relationships between prisons and the outside world.
Benjamin A Barsky’s article Internet Drug Prohibition and the Opioid Overdose Crisis (2024) was published in the Washington Law Journal.
Binyamin Blum published Silent Witnesses: The Material Turn in the Forensic Sciences (2024) in Society and Culture. He presented First Impressions: A History of Footprint Identification in Three Acts at the Asian Legal History Conference in Hue, Vietnam.
Thalia González published Education Equity and Brown: Reform, Retrenchment and Exclusionary Discipline (2024) in Modern Critical Race Theory, with William Martel; and Racial Reckoning and the Police-Free Schools Movement (2024) in UCLA Law Review Discourse, with Rebecca Epstein. Professor González also gave a keynote address at a conference of the United States Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs.
Emily Murphy presented the keynote address Collective Cognitive Capital: Using brain and behavioral science to evaluate public policy at The Future of the Mind Conference at Radboud University, Netherlands. She was also a panelist at the Cognitive Decline and the Law Conference, at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio.
Prithika Balakrishnan’s first article, Mass Surveillance as Racialized Control (2024), was published in UCLA Law Review.
Faculty
Thalia González
Professor of Law and Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair, Co-Director of the Center for Racial and Economic Justice
View Thalia González’s Profile
Rory K. Little
Hon. Raymond L. Sullivan Professor of Law and Emeritus Joseph W. Cotchett Chair and Emeritus Joseph W. Cotchett Chair
View Rory K. Little’s Profile
Emily Murphy
Professor of Law and Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair
View Emily Murphy’s Profile
