Devon W. Carbado

The Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law

  • B.A. UCLA, 1991
  • J.D. Harvard, 1994
  • UCLA Faculty Since 1997

Devon Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and the former Associate Vice Chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. He teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. He has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006 and received the Law School's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003 and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2007. In 2005 Professor Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship. Modeled on the Guggenheim fellowships, it is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2018, he was named an inaugural recipient of the Atlantic Philanthropies Fellowship for Racial Equity.

Professor Carbado writes in the areas of employment discrimination, criminal procedure, implicit bias, constitutional law, and critical race theory. His scholarship appears in law reviews at UCLA, Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, and Yale, among other venues. He is the author of Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (Oxford University Press) (with Mitu Gulati) and the editor of several volumes, including Race Law Stories (Foundation Press) (with Rachel Moran), The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives (Beacon Press) (with Donald Weise), and Time on Two Crosses: The Collective Writings of Bayard Rustin (Cleis Press) (with Donald Weise).  A board member of the African American Policy Forum, Professor Carbado was the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012.

Professor Carbado graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. At Harvard, he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. Carbado joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1997.  He served as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research at the School of Law from 2006-07, and again in 2009-10. Professor Carbado is currently working on a series of articles on affirmative action and a book on race, law, and police violence.

Bibliography

  • Books
    • Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment. The New Press (2022).
    • Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law (edited by Bennett Capers, R. A. Lenhardt, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig). Cambridge University Press (2022).
    • Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America (with Mitu Gulati). Oxford University Press (2013).
    • Race Law Stories (with Rachel Moran). Foundation Press (2008).
    • Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise). Cleis Press (2003).
    • Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction (edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight McBride and Donald Weise). Cleis Press (2002).
    • Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality: A Critical Reader (edited by Devon W. Carbado). New York University Press (1999).
  • Articles And Chapters
    • Strict Scrutiny & The Black Body, 69 UCLA Law Review 2 (2022). Full Text
    • Critical Race Theory Meets Third World Approaches to International Law (with E. Tendayi Achiume), 67 UCLA Law Review 1462 (2021). Full Text
    • Stop-And-Strip Violence: The Doctrinal Migrations of Reasonable Suspicion, 55 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 467 (2020).
    • Colorblind Intersectionality, in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, (edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz, University of California Press, 2019).
    • Footnote 43: Recovering Justice Powell’s Anti-Preference Framing of Affirmative Action, 53 UC Davis Law Review 1117 (2019). Full Text
    • An Intersectional Critique of Tiers of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches to Equal Protection (with Kimberlé W. Crenshaw), 129 The Yale Law Journal Forum 108 (2019). Full Text
    • Intersectionality at 30: Mapping the Margins of Anti-Essentialism, Intersectionality, and Dominance Theory (with Cheryl I. Harris), 132 Harvard Law Review 2193 (2019). Full Text
    • States of Continuity or State of Exception? Race, Law and Politics in the Age of Trump, 34 Constitutional Commentary 1 (2019).
    • Book Review: The Black Police, Policing Our Own (with L. Song Richardson), 131 Harvard Law Review 1979 (2018). Reviewing Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. Full Text
    • From Stop and Frisk to Shoot and Kill: Terry v. Ohio's Pathway to Police Violence, 64 UCLA Law Review 1508 (2017).
    • Predatory Policing, 85 UMKC Law Review 548 (2017). Full Text
    • From Stopping Black People to Killing Black People: The Fourth Amendment Pathways to Police Violence, 105 California Law Review 125 (2017). Full Text
    • Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes, 104 Georgetown Law Journal 1479 (2016). Full Text
    • Privileged or Mismatched: The Lose-Lose Position of African Americans in the Affirmative Action Debate (with Kaytee Turetsky & Valerie Purdie-Vaughns), 64 UCLA Law Review Discourse 174 (2016). SSRN | Full Text
    • Critical Race Theory Meets Social Science (with Daria Roithmayr), 10 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 149 (2014). Abstract
    • The Diversity Feedback Loop, 2014 University of Chicago Legal Forum 345 (2014). Also published in A Nation of Widening Opportunities? The Civil Rights Act at Fifty (edited by Samuel Bagenstos and Ellen Katz, University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2014).  Full Text
    • Race Law Cases in the American Story (with Rachel Moran), in Civil Rights in American Law, History, and Politics, (edited by Austin Sarat, Cambridge University Press, 2014).
    • Colorblind Intersectionality, 38 (4) Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 811-845 (Summer 2013). Full Text
    • Intraracial Diversity, 60 UCLA Law Review 1130 (2013). Full Text
    • Implicit Bias in the Courtroom (with Jerry Kang, Judge Mark Bennett, Pam Casey, Nilanjana Dasgupta, David Faigman, Rachel Godsil, Anthony G. Greenwald, Justin Levinson & Jennifer Mnookin), 59 UCLA Law Review 1124-86 (2012). Full Text
    • Critical What What?, 43 Connecticut Law Review 1593-1643 (2011). Full Text
    • Undocumented Criminal Procedure (with Cheryl Harris), 58 UCLA Law Review 1543-1616 (2011). Full Text
    • Yellow by Law, 97 California Law Review 633-92 (2009).
    • The New Racial Preferences (with Cheryl Harris), California Law Review 1139-1214 (2008).
    • The Story of Law and American Racial Consciousness: Building a Canon One Case at a Time (with Rachel Moran), 76 University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 851 (2008).
    • Foreword: Making Makeup Matter (with Catherine Fish and Mitu Gulati), 14 Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1 (2007).
    • The Story of Jesperson v. Harrah's: Makeup and Women at Work (with G. Mitu Gulati and Gowri Ramachandran), in Employment Discrimination Stories, (edited by Joel W. Friedman, Foundation Press, 2006).
    • Racial Naturalization, 57 American Quarterly 633-58 (2005).
    • Race to the Top of the Corporate Ladder: What Minorities Do When They Get There (with G. Mitu Gulati), 61 Washington and Lee Law Review (2004). Full Text
    • Tenure (with G. Mitu Gulati), 53 Journal of Legal Education 157-73 (2003).
    • What Exactly is Racial Diversity? (with G. Mitu Gulati), 91 California Law Review 1149-65 (2003).
    • The Law and Economics of Critical Race Theory (with G. Mitu Gulati), 112 Yale Law Journal 1757-1828 (2003). Full Text
    • (E)Racing Education, 35 Equity and Excellence in Education 181-94 (2002).
    • (E)Racing the Fourth Amendment, 35 Michigan Law Review 946-1044 (2002).
    • The Harlem Renaissance (with Dwight McBride and Donald Weise), in Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, 1-27 (edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight McBride and Donald Weise, Cleis Press, 2002).
    • The Protest Era (with Donald Weise), in Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, 107-36 (edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight McBride and Donald Weise, Cleis Press, 2002).
    • Coming Out, Black Like Us (with Donald Weise), in Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, 267-88 (edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight McBride and Donald Weise, Cleis Press, 2002).
    • Race to the Bottom, 49 UCLA Law Review 1283-313 (2002).
    • The Fifth Black Woman (with G. Mitu Gulati), 11 The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 701-29 (2001). Anthologized in Critical Race Feminism: A Legal Reader (edited by Adrien Katherine Wing, NYU Press, 2002).
    • Interactions at Work: Remembering David Charny (with G. Mitu Gulati), 17 Harvard Blackletter Law Journal 13-22 (2001).
    • Conversations at Work (with G. Mitu Gulati), 79 Oregon Law Review 103-45 (2000).
    • Black Rights, Gay Rights, Civil Rights, 47 UCLA Law Review 1467-519 (2000). Shorter version appears in Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality:  A Critical Reader (edited by Devon W. Carbado, NYU Press, 1999).
    • Men in Black, 3 The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 427-38 (2000). An earlier version appears as Introduction in Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality: A Critical Reader (edited by Devon W. Carbado, NYU Press, 1999).
    • Race and Sex in Antidiscrimination Law, in Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, 2nd ed. (edited by Leonard W. Levy, Kenneth L. Karst, et al., Macmillan, 2000).
    • Working Identity (with G. Mitu Gulati), 85 Cornell Law Review 1259-1308 (2000).
    • Straight Out of the Closet, 15 UC Berkeley Women’s Law Journal 76-124 (2000). Shorter version appears in Epilogue, Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality:  A Critical Reader (edited by Devon W. Carbado, NYU Press, 1999) and redacted in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (edited by Richard Delgado, 1999).
    • Motherhood and Work in Cultural Context: One Woman’s Patriarchal Bargain, 21 Harvard Women’s Law Journal 1 (1998). Earlier version appeared in Critical Race Feminism: A Legal Reader (NYU Press, 1997). 
    • The Ties That Bind, 19 Chicano/Latino Law Review 283-95 (1998).
    • The Construction of O.J. Simpson as a Racial Victim, 32 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 49-103 (1997). Reprinted in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (edited by Richard Delgado, 1999), Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality:  A Critical Reader (edited by Devon W. Carbado, NYU Press, 1999), and as Black Male Racial Victimhood, 21 Callaloo (1998).
  • Other
    • Tenure: The Shadow Work of Service, 6 Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal 144-51 (2002).
    • Airport Profiling: Cost-Benefit Calculus and Beyond (with G. Mitu Gulati), Economic and Political Weekly (June, 2002).