Law professor named 2018-19 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) has announced the appointment of Devon Carbado, the associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the honorable Harry Pregerson professor of law at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, as the 2018-19 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law. A renowned law professor and legal scholar, Carbado teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory and Criminal Adjudication.

Established in 2014, The William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law leads empirical research at the ABF on law and legal processes related to issues of diversity and inequality experienced by women, people of color, people with disabilities, and persons from the LGBTQ community in legal practice and before the law. The position was created to build upon the work of the ABF’s already robust research program on aspects of law and inequality in the legal profession and institutions of justice, as well as on the impact of diversity on legal processes and institutions.

“It will be a great honor to welcome Devon Carbado to the ABF family this fall,” said ABF Executive Director Ajay K. Mehrotra. “Devon is a prolific scholar whose pathbreaking research on critical race theory and criminal law has been highly influential. Everyone at the ABF is looking forward to learning more about, and from, Devon’s latest book projects.”

Carbado said he is thrilled and honored to have been selected as the 2018-19 Neukom Fellows Research Chair and will work on two books during his time as chair.

“One focuses on race and police violence, ‘The 4th: From Stop and Frisk to Shoot and Kill with One Amendment,’ and is under contract with the New Press; the other, ‘Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten Court Opinions on Race,’ is an edited volume with Bennet Capers, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, and Robin Lenhardt.  Under contract with Cambridge University Press, ‘Critical Race Judgments’ is part of a broader effort to reimage past court decisions from a range of scholarly perspectives,” Carbado said.   

Carbado joined the faculty at UCLA School of Law in 1997 and served as vice dean for faculty and research at the law school from 2006-2007 and 2009-2010. He has received many teaching awards, including Professor of the Year by UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006, the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, the UCLA Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2007.

Carbado has also served as the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School in 2012. He was named an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship in 2005, which is modeled on the Guggenheim fellowships and awarded to scholars whose research furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. Carbado is a board member of the African American Policy Forum.
Carbado writes in the areas of employment discrimination, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and identity and is currently working on a series of articles related to race, law, and police violence. He is the author of “Acting White? Rethinking Race in ‘Post-Racial’ America” (with Mitu Gulati) (Oxford University Press) and the editor of several volumes, including “Race Law Stories” (with Rachel Moran) (Foundation Press); “The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives” (with Donald Weise) (Beacon Press); and “Time on Two Crosses: The Collective Writings of Bayard Rustin” (with Donald Weise) (Cleis Press).
Carbado received his Bachelor of Arts from UCLA in 1991 and his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1994. While at Harvard, he was editor in chief of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisers, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition.