Samuel H. Pillsbury is a Visiting Professor at UCLA, teaching Criminal Law in 2023. He has written extensively on criminal justice, particularly in the areas of law and emotion, punishment and violence. His latest book is Imagining a Greater Justice: Criminal Violence, Punishment, and Relational Justice (2019). He is currently writing on a book on incarceration and mental illness based on his experience as a chaplain in the Twin Towers jail in Los Angeles.

Before law school he was a newspaper reporter covering police and courts in Jacksonville, Florida. He attended the University of Southern California Law Center where he graduated first in his class. After clerking for U.S. District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. he became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the office in Los Angeles. He then joined the faculty of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles where he taught courses including Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, American Legal History and Public Speaking for Lawyers. He is now a professor emeritus. Ordained as an Episcopal deacon in 2006, he has volunteered in Los Angeles juvenile halls and jails and in state prisons in California and New York. He can be reached at pillsbury@law.ucla.edu.