FIRST GRATON SCHOLARS ARRIVE

Scholars from UCLA School of Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights have played a key part in defi ning the new crime of ecocide, which could have signifi cant implications for battling climate destruction. The latest eff ort to produce an internationally accepted legal defi nition of ecocide — meant to describe mass environmental destruction — has its roots in a 2020 symposium at UCLA Law. That event explored the connection between human rights and the climate crisis, and Kate Mackintosh it gave rise to a working group dedicated to exploring a new defi nition of the term. The group joined forces with an international drafting panel, for which Kate Mackintosh, executive director of the Promise Institute, served as co-deputy chair.

“It seems obvious, on a moral and intuitive level, that destruction of our environment should be an international crime,” says Mackintosh, who relied on the support of UCLA Law students during her work on the project. “Our job was to bring together our collective knowledge of international criminal and environmental law and create a credible new international crime to take its place alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Ecocide has been in the lexicon since the Vietnam War, when the term was used to describe the immediate and long-term damage that the defoliant chemical Agent Orange caused. In the decades since, scholars and legal experts launched eff orts to recognize ecocide as a crime of the same magnitude as genocide but politics and shifting international priorities kept those eff orts at bay. While some nations adopted ecocide laws, the global community never fully embraced them, limiting legal options to hold even the most destructive actors accountable.

Thanks to Mackintosh and her colleagues, the new defi nition could revolutionize the way the world determines what constitutes a crime against the health of the planet.

For the new defi nition to become a part of international law, two-thirds of the nations that are signed up to the International Criminal Court must vote to adopt it. If adopted, ecocide would be the fi rst new international crime since 1945, when the horrors of World War II fueled international support for common legal foundations against genocide and crimes against humanity.

Mackintosh says that under an international law shaped by the new defi nition, corporate and governmental decisionmakers could be held personally responsible for their actions or inactions.

“Ecocide law has been written so that individuals who have the ability to make powerful environmental decisions will understand they are personally accountable for the outcomes of those decisions,” she says. “Ideally ecocide law need never be used. The hope is that this will change the risk analysis in a way that leads to better choices for the environment. We all win when that happens.”

Ashley Anderson

Shara Burwell Ashley Anderson was broadly engaged as a high school student in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. National Honor Society member. Two-time participant in the VEX Robotics World Championship, where she competed against kids from communities far from her home in Cherokee County. And through college at Harvard University and the years that followed, Anderson developed a strong focus and sense of purpose — a motivating ethic that she can now put into action as a Graton Scholar at UCLA Law. “I hope to use my legal training to ensure healthy ecosystems on tribal lands, including my hometown,” she says today.

Alongside Shara Burwell and Rachel Hsu, Anderson joins UCLA Law in large part thanks to a transformative full-tuition scholarship that was created in 2020 through a gift of $15 million from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. The Graton Scholars program brings to the law school the most talented students who are from Native Nations or who are interested in pursuing careers as tribal advocates. UCLA Law is a longtime leader among the country’s preeminent law schools in developing courses, programs, and scholarship addressing the legal standing and rights of Native peoples. Graton Scholars thus gain an invaluable education and entrée into a distinguished Indian law network.

“We are so fortunate to be welcoming Ashley, Shara, and Rachel to UCLA Law as our fi rst Graton Scholars,” says Professor Angela R. Riley, who oversees the Graton Scholars program. “We know that they — and the generations of Graton Scholars who follow them — will use their legal education to advocate for Indian country, defend tribal sovereignty, and advance Indigenous rights.”

Hsu attended Barnard College and has worked as a tutor for disabled students, a legal assistant at an intellectual property law fi rm, a supervisor at a homeless shelter, and an intern at the Museum of Modern Art. “While I’m approaching law school with an open mind, I know my legal career will center around art and cultural property law,” she says. “The protection of Native American cultural artifacts and practices deserve my greatest focus as the longest-standing cultural patrimony in Los Angeles, California, and North America overall.”

Burwell graduated from San Diego State University and worked for the innovative Peruvian organization Awamaki, empowering Indigenous women and girls who work as artisanal weavers in rural communities. “My grandmother is a member of the Leech Lake band of the Ojibwe tribe and an Indian boarding school survivor. She was taken from her reservation and family and adopted to a white family, and yet, she is one of the lucky ones,” she says. “The systems of power are failing Indigenous women around the world and these women need an advocate to fi ght for them. I want to be that advocate."

Devon Carbado Sunita Patel

UCLA recognized Professor Devon Carbado and Assistant Professor Sunita Patel with top honors for their service and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Carbado received the 2020-21 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for Career Commitment to Diversity. Patel earned the 2020-21 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for Community Service and Praxis. The awards are presented annually by the UCLA Academic Senate, which traditionally recognizes outstanding professors and other instructors in a variety of disciplines across the campus.

Carbado and Patel are the third and fourth members of the law school community to receive these awards since they were fi rst bestowed in 2000.

Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law. For nearly three decades, he has been a global leader and major driver of scholarship in critical race theory, implicit bias, employment discrimination, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and more. He co-founded the Critical Race Studies program more than 20 years ago and more recently served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. A widely published author, his works include the seminal book Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (Oxford University Press, 2013), which he co-wrote with Mitu Gulati. His cutting-edge and resonant scholarship has drawn widespread praise, and he has earned leading fellowships from the Fletcher Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies.

Carbado has also steered generations of students to impactful careers as lawyers of conscience. The numerous awards that he has earned include the Clyde Ferguson Award from the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Minority Groups, the law school's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, and UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award and Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. They recognize the value that he has long brought as a teacher and mentor inside and out of the classroom. He has been a member of the UCLA Law faculty since 1997.

Patel works closely with students through her leadership as the founding faculty director of UCLA Law’s Veterans Legal Clinic, which is housed on the Veterans Administration campus in West Los Angeles. There, she guides students as they provide a wide array of legal services to unhoused veterans and their families, including access to benefi ts and eff orts to address criminal justice issues that enhance veterans’ opportunities for jobs, housing, and stability.

She focuses her research and teaching on policing, social movements, and structural inequality, and her current scholarship focuses on how policing intersects with healthcare and other areas of care work. A seasoned litigator and advocate in public interest law, she previously steered a class action lawsuit that curbed the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk practice, among other impactful cases. She joined UCLA Law in 2017.

While the COVID-19 pandemic continued to rage during 2021, UCLA Law's COVID Behind Bars Data Project zeroed in on a community that has been especially vulnerable to its impact: people who live and work in America's prisons and jails. Part of this work included key research and data analysis that formed the basis of articles in two leading national journals, both underscoring the disparate impact of the disease.

In April, Professor Sharon Dolovich, who founded and directs the project, co-authored an article that analyzes key data on the willingness of incarcerated people to receive vaccinations. The article, “Willingness to Receive COVID-19 Vaccination among Incarcerated or Detained Persons in Correctional and Detention Facilities — Four States, September–December 2020,” was published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed epidemiology publications.

The writers found that willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine was lowest among Black participants (36.7%), incarcerated people between the ages of 18 and 29 (38.5%), and those held in jails versus prisons (43.7%). Prisoners most commonly refused vaccinations because they distrusted healthcare, correctional, or government personnel or institutions. And among study participants who said that they would refuse vaccinations, nearly one in fi ve believed that they were not at risk for COVID-19 and deemed vaccinations unnecessary.

In October, Dolovich co-wrote an article on rates of COVID-19 infection and death in U.S. prisons in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the country’s leading medical journal. The research letter, “COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality in Federal and State Prisons Compared With the US Population, April 5, 2020, to April 3, 2021,” delivers an accounting of “COVID-19 cases and deaths among prisoners in all 50 state prison systems and the Federal Bureau of Prisons” over the course of a year.

The COVID Behind Bars Data Project collected the information from sources including corrections departments’ websites, the Marshall Project, and the Associated Press, and the co-authors found that nearly 400,000 COVID-19 cases and 2,555 deaths were reported in U.S. prisons. They wrote that “the cumulative toll of COVID-19 has been several times greater among the prison population than the overall US population.”

The publications followed a July 2020 piece in JAMA, “COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons,” in which Dolovich and her co-authors found that people incarcerated in U.S. prisons tested positive for COVID-19 at a rate 5.5 times higher than the general public.