LMU Loyola Law School Recent Scholarship 2024-2025

Scholarship RECENT 2024 2025

LMU Loyola Law School faculty are moving the law forward with deep research and innovative ideas, within the academy and beyond. Over the past twelve months alone, our scholars and their work have been cited in at least 802 articles, 144 treatises, and 116 federal and state court judicial decisions. We are delighted to showcase a sample of our recent publications and impact. For more, please see our work at lls.edu/scholarship

Kaiponanea Matsumura recently published Against Stability and Asian Americans and the Harm of Exceptionalized Inclusion in the Vanderbilt and Cornell flagship law reviews and an article in the peer-reviewed Social Issues and Policy Review that provides a research and policy guide for psychologists studying consensual non-monogamy. He is currently working on chapters for Race, Racism, and the Law and the Oxford Handbook on Families and the Law, as well as an article on the U.S. Army’s treatment of marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese people during World War II.

Andrew Keane Woods writes about law and technology. His recent work includes From Gods to Google (Yale Law Journal 2025), which examines how tech companies invoke constitutional protections to resist democratic oversight, and The New Social Contracts (Vanderbilt Law Review 2024), which examines the power of platform terms of service to shape basic civil rights. His current research maps when—and why—we should defer to algorithmic judgments versus insist on human control.

Stephanie Bornstein, a leading expert on pay equity and discrimination, is co-drafting the first U.S. treatise on the Equal Pay Act and state pay transparency laws, to be published by Lexis/Matthew Bender in 2026. Other articles in progress focus on preserving systemic claims in arbitration and empirically assessing the impact of state initiatives on equal pay. In June 2025, she co-founded The Legal DEI Project, an educational initiative to counter political rhetoric with clear information about what the law requires and permits businesses to do to ensure fair, nondiscriminatory workplaces.

Kevin Lapp ’s scholarship investigates immigration and criminal justice. His recently co-authored article Critical Immigration Legal Theory published in the Boston University Law Review. His most recent work, appearing in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, examines American punishment through the lens of the January 6 Capitol Breach prosecutions, analyzing the narratives of responsibility and the sentencing outcomes in those cases for insights about modern criminal justice and the rule of law.

Julia Mendoza uses historical archival methods, oral history, and ethnography to produce community-based legal scholarship. She recently published The Language of Mass Incarceration and Organized Abandonment in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties. Her article Considering Collective Reparations is forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review. She is currently conducting research for two projects that will focus on community organizers resisting the recent immigration raids and police violence in unincorporated areas such as East L.A.

Colin Doyle’s expertise spans from technical computer science studies to theoretical implications of large language models and other forms of automation for law. His co-authored article If You Give an LLM a Legal Practice Guide was published in March 2025 in the Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Computer Science and Law, a preeminent computer science and law journal. In his recent article in The American Journal of Law and Equality, he asks the question: Can the LLM breakthrough usher in a new era of automated self-help tools for low-income litigants?

Scholarship

Cesare Romano , an expert on public international law, recently co-authored The Human Right to Science: History, Development and Normative Content with Oxford University Press. Building from this influential work, he also published a chapter in the edited Workshop Proceedings: High-Level Dialogue on Responding to the Climate Emergency to Protect Human Rights, and he published another chapter in Scientific Freedom: A Guide to the Right to Science.

Laurie Levenson , author and co-author of over twelve criminal law casebooks and treatises, published The Work is “Humility”: Why the Supreme Court Needed to Adopt a Code of Judicial Ethics in the Pepperdine Law Review and a co-authored article Comparative Double Jeopardy: New Approaches for Upholding an Old Principle. Her book review Justice on Trial will appear in a publication by the California Historical Society, and she wrote two book reviews this year that appeared in the L.A. Review of Books.

Ángel Díaz examines how private law interacts with public regulation to shape access to public space and privatize inequality. His article The Public Harms of Private Surveillance, forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, advances a tort framework for analyzing how private surveillance technologies such as doorbell cameras and license plate readers limit substantive freedom and equality. A work in process develops a theory of the commons that centers the relationship between racial segregation, municipal disinvestment, and immigrant social norms in shaping how Latino communities manage shared urban resources.

Ted Seto ’s latest article Four Principles of Optimal Tax System Design in the Virginia Tax Review (2024) offers four new nonmathematical principles which, if implemented, would minimize the distortive effects of taxation on behavior, reduce revenue loss by reason of such distortive effects, and make it more likely that tax rules would achieve their intended distributive goals. He will be presenting a work in progress on social safety nets at the AALS meeting Section on Poverty Law.

Simona Grossi, a constitutional law and judicial system scholar, published three articles this year: one exposing misconceptions in the Supreme Court’s §1983 jurisprudence and two companion pieces in the UC Law Constitutional Quarterly on procedural due process and the First Amendment in equal protection and affirmative action. She is now working on Constitutional Conflict Resolution, proposing a framework to balance competing constitutional powers and rights, and another article on the tension between executive power and free speech today.

Amy Levin ’s scholarship focuses on student well-being and law school pedagogy. Her recent article The Kids Aren’t Alright will appear in the Arkansas Law Review, and it was featured by the ABA Commission on Disability Rights, the National Law Journal, and The American Lawyer. Her works in progress include a piece in the Journal of Legal Education, Rising to the Mental Health Challenge in Law Schools

Rebecca Delfino ’s recent scholarship examines how generative AI and deepfakes are reshaping the legal system, with a focus on judicial ethics, evidentiary integrity, and access to justice. In Spring 2025 she published Pay-to-Play in the Seton Hall Law Review, which builds on her earlier work on the deepfake defense. She has in progress Deepfakes on Trial 2.0, a draft of which was cited by the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules at the U.S. Judicial Conference.

Katherine Pratt ’s scholarship advances thinking in tax law toward justice. She recently published Making the Best of Long-Term Care for Seniors in Law and the 100-Year Life, and her article The Critical Missing Piece of Reparations: Nontaxation is forthcoming in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender & Social Justice. She also recently coorganized the symposium It’s a Man’s World: Revealing and Addressing Hidden Gender Bias in Tax Law and Policy for the American Tax Policy Institute.

2024 - 2025

Albertina Antognini’s scholarship examines how categories that may appear natural are in fact products of law. Her recent Fraudulent Families (UC Irvine Law Review) considers the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence addressing unwed parents and exposes how concerns over fraud serve to mask contestable normative judgments. She is also working on a co-authored article Abolishing the Family (forthcoming Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review), which explores what an abolitionist family law might entail by engaging with the literature on family abolition.

Lauren Willis , an expert in consumer protection regulation and remedies, recently returned from a Fulbright in Melbourne, Australia. She also served last year as a Special Advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division. Currently, she advises regulators in the UK and Australia on policy relating to consumer protection and the green energy transition. Her works in progress include a study of a novel Australian regime governing consumer finance and a book project, Regulating for Results

Michael Serota , a criminal law scholar, is working on several grant-funded interdisciplinary projects. The Criminal Minds Project conducts a nationally representative survey on public attitudes about mens rea and Legislating Criminal Justice Reform conducts a systematic content analysis of more than three decades of legislative debate. Serota recently presented his work at leading U.S. conferences in the fields of law, political science, and criminology, as well as to multidisciplinary audiences in the United Kingdom and in Germany.

Jennifer Fan, a leading scholar in corporate governance and entrepreneurial law, recently coauthored two articles addressing governance risks in startups. One analyzes how AI startups adopt novel governance structures that raise distinctive challenges, while the other critiques “founder worship,” where governance responsibilities are deferred in the name of innovation. Together, her scholarship highlights the importance of robust governance frameworks in fast-moving industries to safeguard legitimacy, accountability, and sustainable growth.

Justin Hughes recently returned from a Fulbright in Helsinki, Finland. His 2025 works include an article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology exploring website blocking in different countries and an article (co-authored with Margo Bagley) in the Harvard International Law Journal that proposes using trade secret law to protect indigenous communities’ traditional knowledge. Along with David Nimmer, Hughes also completed a new 200+ page chapter on secondary liability doctrines in the Nimmer on Copyright treatise.

Amy Motomura ’s scholarship focuses on patent law’s role in innovation and on the design of patent law institutions and doctrine. Her most recent article is The Inventorship Fallacy (UC Davis Law Review 2025), which questions the traditional understanding of inventors in patent law. She is also the co-author of an article forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education and is currently working on an article arguing for reform of inventorship doctrine.

Michael Guttentag ’s recent work calls for legislation to establish a comprehensive federal insider trading ban in the U.S. In a chapter published in 2025 in a Research Handbook on Insider Trading, Guttentag laid out the economic case for insider trading law reform. He also continues to explore ways legal rules can be used to simultaneously address inequality and enhance productivity, publishing in the Boston University Law Review and in the evolutionary psychology peerreviewed publication, Evolution and Human Behavior.

Tristin Green’s scholarship focuses on inequality and antidiscrimination laws. Following up on her second book Racial Emotion at Work (UC Press), released in late 2023, Green recently published Collective Complaint, an essay in which she cautions against romanticizing group-based complaints. She is currently co-authoring an article for the U. Pennsylvania Law Review, and she will also soon publish an article in the Wake Forest Law Review in which she exposes a troubling shift in antidiscrimination law toward measuring individual harm in determining whether discrimination occurred.

Scholarship

American Journal of Law and Equality

• Yale Law

Journal • Social Issues & Policy

Review

• Virginia Tax Review • University of Pennsylvania Law

Review

• Seton Hall Law Review

• Wake Forest Law Review • UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

• Vanderbilt Law Review

• William & Mary Journal of Race

• Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology • Gender & Social Justice

• Boston University Law

Review • Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties

• Cornell Law Review

• Evolution of Human Behavior

• Harvard International Law

Journal • UCLA Law Review

• Virginia Tax Review • UC Irvine Law Review

• Columbia Journal of Law & Arts • UC Davis Law Review

• Pepperdine Law

Review

• Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review

Yxta Murray , whose innovative scholarly work merges legal analysis with fiction, won the 2025 Blackwell Prize in Writing, is the winner of a 2026 Pushcart Prize, and is just returning from a Harvard-Radcliffe fellowship. She has two books out this year, We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism and the Law and A History of Hazardous Objects: A Novel. Her forthcoming novel Carrizo Plain, based on numerous interviews with farmworkers, is an example of how fieldwork can influence art and policy.

Priscilla Ocen received a Leading Edge fellowship to launch the Center for Community Alternatives to Policing, which will serve as a hub for research, policy development, and community collaboration around non-carceral community safety models. Her recent work includes Prison Family Law in Centering Families of Color: Identifying Systemic Inequalities and Social Justice Change Leadership. She serves as policy advisor to freeamerica, a social impact organization that seeks to end mass incarceration in the United States.

Justin Levitt , a democracy scholar recently back from two years in the White House and two years in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, testified this year in a U.S. Senate Spotlight Forum, authored two Supreme Court amicus briefs, and advised election officials nationwide on responses to federal executive orders and DOJ inquiries. His most recent scholarship includes a 25th-anniversary re-examination of Bush v. Gore and a book project on the underappreciated social determinants of democracy.