Assistant Professor of Law
- Ph.D., New York University
- J.D., New York University
- B.A., New York University
Alexander Arnold is an Assistant Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses on civil procedure, federal courts, and legal history. Arnold’s research focuses principally on the history of “how law knows,” i.e. how legal institutions attempt to use, and generate, knowledge about the world outside the courtroom. His current projects explore the history of truth-seeking in civil litigation and the epistemological history of law and economics. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Arnold is a co-convenor of UCLA’s Legal History Workshop and a core faculty member in UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA Law, he clerked for Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York and worked in trial and appellate litigation at a firm in New York City. He also previously held positions as a Remarque Institute fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and as a Junior Research Fellow in legal history at the Center for the Administration of Criminal Law.
Arnold holds a J.D. from NYU Law, where he was a Furman Academic Scholar and Lederman Fellow, a Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history from NYU’s Department of History & Institute of French Studies, and a B.A. from NYU’s College of Arts & Science. Arnold is a recipient of NYU Law’s Vanderbilt Medal and Law & Economics Prize, and his research has been supported by institutions including the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the History of Science Society, the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d'Amérique, and the Dartmouth History Institute. He is a member of the New York Bar.
Bibliography
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Articles, Essays, And Book Reviews
- “So, to the Country”: Truth-Seeking and the Birth of the Common Law, 79 Stan L. Rev. (forthcoming 2027). Abstract
- "Ye Shall Know the Truth”: Truth-Seeking, Judicial Economics, and the Transformation of Civil Procedure, Mich. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2027). Abstract
- Procedure, Machines, and the Transformation of American Law. review essay on Kellen Funk, Law's Machinery: Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America's Industrial Age (2025), Am. J. Legal Hist. (forthcoming 2027).
- Rev., Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, 33 Law & History Rev. 975 (2019).
- Rev., Darrin M. McMahon & Samuel Moyn, Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, 23 Mod. and Contemp. France, 424.
- Searching for Foucault in an Age of Inequality (with Daniel Jenkins), Los Angeles Rev. of Books (March, 2015). (one of the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Most Read Essays of 2015”)
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Works In Progress
- Equity’s Epistemology: Truth, Facts, and Procedure in Early Courts of Equity.
- Law and Economics Before “Law & Economics”: Law and Economic Knowledge in Nineteenth Century France.
- Civil Rights Facts (with Jerry Kang).
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Other
- 10 x 10, Int'l. Journal of Const. Law 465 (2010). (translator from Spanish)
- Report on the Nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lawyers' Comm. for Civil Rights Under Law Rep. (2022). (co-drafter)
- The Demise of Clemency for Lifers in Pennsylvania, Ctr. on the Admin. of Crim. Law Rep. (April 2019). (lead researcher)