Josh Weiss is a Binder Fellow at UCLA School of Law. His research focuses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and federal sentencing law. Weiss’s scholarship interrogates the ways in which the U.S. criminal legal system can adapt, but often fails to adapt, to changing social and ethical norms in a pluralistic society. His recent work studies discretionary back-end sentence reduction mechanisms, often referred to as “second looks,” as levers of sentencing policy, and considers what the proliferation of second-look laws over the past two decades reveals about sentencing law more broadly. Weiss’s work has been published in the Stanford Law Review and is forthcoming in the SMU Law Review.

Before coming to UCLA, Weiss was an appellate lawyer at the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Los Angeles, where he represented indigent clients before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and in federal district court.

Weiss received his J.D. from Yale Law School and graduated magna cum laude from Columbia College, with a B.A. in philosophy. During law school, he was the executive editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review, a member of the Criminal Justice Clinic, and the student director of the Ethics Bureau at Yale, a clinic that worked on death penalty appeals.

After law school, Weiss clerked for the Honorable Victor Marrero on the Southern District of New York, and for the Honorable Patty Shwartz on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.