SHARON DOLOVICH WINS UCLA DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD

UCLA Law Professor Sharon Dolovich earned the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2020-21, with an additional citation for Distinction in Teaching at the Graduate Level. With only six professors across the UCLA campus so honored, the Distinguished Teaching Award is the university’s highest recognition of excellence in the classroom. The UCLA Academic Senate has presented the award since 1961 “to increase awareness of UCLA’s leadership in teaching and public service by honoring individuals who bring respect and admiration to teaching at UCLA.” In addition to the honor for members of the university’s tenure-track faculty, awards also go to leading lecturers and teaching assistants. Dolovich is the 32nd member of the law school community to earn this accolade. She joined UCLA Law in 2000 and is the faculty director of the Prison Law and Policy Program. She teaches courses in and is an authority on criminal law, the constitutionality of prisons and punishment, and other post-conviction issues. Dolovich co-edited and received wide acclaim for the 2017 Sharon Dolovich book The New Criminal Justice Thinking (NYU Press), which built on her work as a scholar who is known for closely collaborating with and mentoring her students.

“It is an honor to receive this award in a school known for its outstanding teaching,” Dolovich says. “For me, teaching is a two-way street. I learn from my students every day.”

Dolovich founded the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project and assembled a team of more than 160 people, including many student and alumni volunteers, to compile and analyze information on the harsh impact of COVID-19 in the nation’s prisons and jails. Since March 2020, the project has regularly made national news, and Dolovich has shared bylines with her collaborators in the Journal of the American Medical Association and other leading publications.

In supporting Dolovich’s nomination for the award, numerous students, alumni, and colleagues lauded her work as “a builder” – as much in the expanding academic fi eld of prison law as in the successful careers and lives of her students and former students.

UCLA Law Professor E. Tendayi Achiume was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for 2021. The honor from the World Economic Forum – the organization that presents the renowned annual summit in Davos, Switzerland – celebrates “the world’s most inspiring and responsible leaders under the age of 40.” It recognizes people who “come from diff erent communities and industries worldwide” and are committed to making a diff erence.

The year’s 112 honorees include leaders in politics, economics, social movements, and the arts, and eight, including Achiume, are from Africa. According to the World Economic Forum, “These young leaders exemplify what we need most today: hope, empathy, authenticity and the drive to develop solutions that can change the world for the better.”

Achiume earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and joined UCLA Law in 2014. Since 2017, she has also served as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. She is the fi rst woman to hold that position, and she frequently travels the globe to observe situations of severe injustice and draft reports on inequality, hate speech, and other matters of grave concern, often with key input from her students. This year, she was appointed the inaugural holder of the Alicia Miñana Chair in Law. At UCLA Law, she teaches international human rights law, E. Tendayi Achiume property, and the innovative International Human Rights Clinic, through which students collaborate with local and international human rights organizations on policy, litigation, and advocacy projects. She has taken teams of students to U.N. summits in New York and Switzerland, where they have gained an inside view into international human rights work at the highest level. In 2020, she won the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest recognition of excellence in the classroom.