Faculty Updates

Professor William J. Aceves

Professor Aceves remains engaged in human rights and civil rights work. He serves in leadership roles with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice & Accountability. Aceves is also actively involved in pro bono litigation. This past year, he filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of victims of child slave labor and with the First Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of an asylum applicant from El Salvador.

Professor Susan Bisom-Rapp

Since January 2021, Professor Bisom-Rapp has been serving as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Women in Legal Education (WILE). She has been working on two types of programming: 1) programming designed for the newest WILE Section members, and 2) programming for the AALS Annual Meeting in January 2022, which includes a primary program on Status, Gender, and Intersectionality in the Legal Academy. She organized an August webinar for people on the law teaching market, which featured four law school deans, including Dean Sean Scott, who discussed aspects of the law school faculty recruitment process. In addition, she’s been working with the Chairs of the Sections on Leadership, Professional Responsibility, and Pro Bono to honor the legacy of the late Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode, who passed away unexpectedly in January.

Professor Justin P. Brooks

Professor Brooks’ book “You Might Go to Prison,” which highlights the wrongful conviction work he has done over the past 30 years, has been accepted for publication by UC Press. The expected release date for the book will be Fall 2022.

Professor James M. Cooper

Professor Cooper’s new documentary film, (with Chilean film director Sebastián Vives del Solar) Border Industrial Complex, debuted on March 11, 2021, at the 28th Annual San Diego Latino Film Festival and was selected as part of the showcase South Bay Drive-In event. Click here for the link. The password is “border”. His scholarship and filmmaking were featured in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law.

Professor Jessica K. Fink

Professor Fink recently had accepted for publication an article that focuses on the government’s failure to properly support working families - and, particularly, working women - in the context of the Covid pandemic. Drawing upon historical analogies from the WW2 era, the article argues, among other things, that our government could have diverted some of the billions of dollars that it spent on unemployment payments during the pandemic to help support government-funded learning centers for school aged children engaged in remote learning. Such a plan not only would have provided necessary relief for working families during this dire time, but also could have provided employment for perhaps hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs were impacted by the pandemic. This article is forthcoming in the Utah Law Review.

Professor Danielle C. Jefferis

Professor Jefferis is working on a trilogy of articles that will each critically examine from a different lens prisons and incarceration in the United States. The first article in the trilogy examines “carceral intent” - the state of mind of the people, entities, and governments responsible.

Professor Laura M. Padilla

Professor Padilla wrote a chapter entitled “Presumptions of Incompetence, Gender Sidelining and Women Law Deans,” which appeared in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, University Press of Colorado (2020). She has been on panels related to the book at LatCrit 2019, the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting, a 2021 ClassCrit workshop, and Law and Society’s 2021 Annual Meeting. An expanded version of the chapter was published in 35 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 1 (2021). More recently, her article entitled “Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? Sea Level Rise, Land Use and Property Rights,” was published in 51 Tex. Env’t’l. L.J. 27 (2021).

Professor Brenda Simon

Simon’s latest publication, “Preserving the Fruits of Labor: Impediments to University Inventor Mobility,” was recently accepted for publication in the Tennessee Law Review. This article sets forth a detailed account of barriers to inventor mobility and why they matter. It recognizes, describes, and coins the concept of innovation-essential components.” And the article explores the fascinating interplay between departing inventors and academic institutions through the lens of the largely ignored strawberry industry and its implications for innovation more broadly.

Professor Emerita Linda H. Morton

On August 31, Dean Scott recognized Professor Emerita Linda Morton as a “Law Champion” of California Western. Donors to the law school’s Annual Fund have the opportunity to honor specific faculty or staff members as Law Champions—individuals who have made an important, positive impact on our students or other members of the California Western community. With her recent gift to the Annual Fund, Immigration Clinic Director and Adjunct Professor Anne Bautista selected Professor Morton for this special honor.