2019-2020 School Year

The Criminal Justice Program is Growing!

The Criminal Justice Program (CJP) at UCLA School of Law, with grant support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Liberty Hill Foundation, has created a new fellowship at UCLA Law and an initiative focused on advancing the interests of youth directly impacted by the juvenile justice system. The program will work with the Los Angeles County Division of Youth Diversion and Development to perform research and identify best practices for diverting young people from the juvenile justice system and connecting them to supportive community organizations. This year, CJP hired Leah Gasser-Ordaz as the program’s Juvenile Justice Fellow.

Training Students in Practical Skills

125 law students and 24 public defenders across Southern California participated in a day-long training session for the 5th Annual Public Defense Training Day. The training pairs students with practicing public defenders to practice litigation skills and receive real time feedback. This year the keynote speaker was David Sutton, Trial Chief at the Federal Public Defender Office in the Central District of California.

CJP also organized a series of four summer trainings for students with internships in prosecutor and defenders' offices to help students hone their skills in evidence, 4th Amendment suppression motions, and investigations.

California Systems Impacted Bar Association Convening

In early 2020, The Criminal Justice Program co-hosted the first ever California Systems Impacted Bar Association convening. This convening focused on access to the legal profession for formerly incarcerated and system involved individuals. It featured three panels comprised of law school admissions personnel, formerly incarcerated and system involved law students and attorneys, and State Bar of California officials. CSIBA’s overarching mission is to diversify California’s legal profession by increasing access to legal education and California State Bar licensure for people who are formerly incarcerated or system involved.

Criminal Justice Law Review

In the 2019-2020 school year, the Criminal Justice Law Review organized two conferences on fines and fees in the criminal legal system, one at Harvard Law School in collaboration with Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, and the second in collaboration with the Harvard’s CJPP, ACLU SoCal, UCLA CJP and the UCLA Labor Center. Both conferences laid the groundwork for a dynamic Issue including articles ranging from investigating fees associated with alleged substance abuse disorder to restitution.

"Cullors v. County of Los Angeles" Civil Rights Lawsuit

Nine incarcerated individuals and the organizations Dignity & Power Now and the Youth Justice Coalition filed a class action in state court to force L.A. jails to “implement constitutionally mandated procedures to protect people who are incarcerated from contracting COVID-19 in custody” and to release people who are at high risk of serious illness or death due to the virus. The Gilbert Foundation Associate Director of CJP, Alicia Virani, and UCLA Law faculty Aaron Littman and Catherine Sweetser are part of the litigation team. Students Landry Balance ’22, Ary Hansen ’21, So Young Kim ’22, Becca Kutlow ’20, Dylan Lee ’22, Cooper Mayne ’21, Shyann Murphy ’22, Andy Philipson ’21, Hannah Pollack ’20, and Karina Silva ’22, provided substantial research support to the litigation.

Criminal Defense Clinic

Students and faculty members with the UCLA School of Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic played a key role in securing the release of an at-risk person incarcerated at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center as part of the clinic’s broader effort to reduce the acute risks that people who are incarcerated face from the coronavirus.

COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project

When the pandemic started, Professor Sharon Dolovich began collecting data concerning the impact of COVID-19 in prisons and jails. This effort grew into what is now the UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project. Professor Dolovich serves as Director and Aaron Littman, UCLA Binder Clinical Fellow, serves as Deputy Director. This project is collecting a plethora of data that has been of great assistance to advocacy efforts around the country to minimize the harmful impact of COVID-19 inside jails and prisons. The team now includes two full-time data scientists, an investigator, and volunteers including UCLA Law's Jordan Palmer ’21 and Grace DiLaura ’12.

Criminal Justice Program Leaders

Máximo Langer, Faculty Director, is a leading authority in domestic, comparative and international criminal law. His recent and upcoming publications include "The Quiet Expansion of Universal Jurisdiction," 30 European Journal of International Law 779 (2019) (with Mackenzie Eason); "Penal Abolitionism and Criminal Law Minimalism: Here and There, Now and Then," 134 Harvard Law Review Forum (forthcoming October 2020); and "Plea Bargaining, Conviction without Trial, and the Global Administratization of Criminal Convictions," 4 Annual Review of Criminology (forthcoming 2021).

Alicia Virani '05, The Gilbert Foundation Associate Director, is a former deputy public defender with a background in juvenile and restorative justice.

Robin Steinberg, Senior Fellow, is the founder and former executive director of The Bronx Defenders and CEO of the Bail Project.

Leah Gasser-Ordaz, Juvenile Justice Fellow, received her J.D. from UC Irvine School of Law and B.A. in Political Science from UCLA. She joins UCLA's Criminal Justice Program from Public Counsel in Los Angeles, where she worked in the Homelessness Prevention Law Project and the Transition Age Youth project.

Faculty Highlights

In July, 2020 the 7th edition of the casebook, Federal Criminal Law and Its Enforcement (7th ed. West, 2020), authored by Norman Abrams (UCLA), Sara Beale (Duke) and Susan Klein (U. Texas), was published. The book covers key issues in federal criminal law and includes material on timely topics such as the federal criminal justice questions relating to: obstruction of justice in the special counsel investigation involving the administration of President Donald Trump; possible political interference in federal prosecutors' decision-making; enforcement of immigration crimes; federal efforts to deal with criminal violence at the local level; and recent college athletic admissions scandals.

Professor Beth Colgan had numerous publications this year, including most recently Beyond Graduation: Economic Sanctions and Structural Reform, 69 Duke L.J. 1529 (2020) -- The value of graduating economic sanctions according to ability to pay is typically measured by focusing on the individual benefits that accrue to those without a meaningful ability to pay. This article uses abolitionism as a heuristic to instead measure graduation against the goals of dismantling the carceral state and its replacement with systems of transformative justice. Doing so indicates that graduation is in some way consistent with and in other ways in opposition to structural forms of criminal legal systems.

Professor Sharon Dolovich authored Evading the Eighth Amendment: Prison Conditions and the Courts, in The Eighth Amendment and Its Future in a New Age of Punishment (Cambridge University Press: William Berry & Meghan Ryan, eds., 2020) and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons and Jails, Journal of the American Medical Association, July 8, 2020 (senior author, with Saloner (lead author), Parish, Ward and DiLaura).

The Criminal Justice Program thanks The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation for generous annual funding that provides core support to the program. We are also extremely grateful to the foundations and individual donors who support our work. If you are inspired to give to CJP, please contact Alicia Virani, virani@law.ucla.edu.

For more information, contact:

Máximo Langer
Professor of Law
Faculty Director, Criminal Justice Program
UCLA School of Law
langer@law.ucla.edu
310.825.8484

Alicia Virani
The Gilbert Foundation Associate Director, Criminal Justice Program
UCLA School of Law
virani@law.ucla.edu
310.825.5216

Keep in touch with the Criminal Justice Program!