Professor of Law
Professor of African American Studies (by courtesy)
Professor of Public Policy (by courtesy)
Professor of Sociology (by courtesy)
- B.A. University of California, Davis, 1997
- M.A. Emory University, 2000
- J.D. University of Chicago Law School, 2008
- Ph.D. Emory University, 2009
- UCLA Faculty Since 2013
Sherod Thaxton is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, and former Faculty Director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. He also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology at the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences. Professor Thaxton teaches Business Crime, Capital Punishment, Criminal Adjudication, Criminal Law, Federal White Collar Crime, Habeas Corpus, and Introduction to Legal Analysis. His scholarship centers on quantitative empirical legal studies, with a substantive focus on criminal law, criminal procedure, and the sociology of crime and punishment. Prior to joining the law faculty, he was the Earl B. Dickerson Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School and an attorney in the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Sacramento, California.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of California at Davis, Professor Thaxton enrolled in the sociology program at Emory University and studied under the direction of Robert Agnew. While pursuing his graduate studies, he was the principal investigator of the Death Penalty Tracking Project for the Office of the Multi-County Public Defender in Atlanta, Georgia. At Emory, he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees—specializing in criminology and social psychology—and was selected as a finalist for the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award. Professor Thaxton received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, an Academy of Achievement student honoree, and a Public Interest Law Prize recipient.He was also an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and the University of Chicago Legal Forum. Prior to law school, he was a Soros Justice Postgraduate Fellow at the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation in New York, and a Law and Social Science Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.
Bibliography
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Articles And Chapters
- Race and Privilege Misunderstood: Athletics and Selective College Admissions in (and Beyond) the Supreme Court Affirmative Action Cases (with Uma Mazyck Jayakumar, William C. Kidder, & Eddie Comeaux ), 70 UCLALRD 230 (2023). Full Text
- When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's 'Mismatch and Bar Passage', UCLA School of Law Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 22-12 (March 2022). Full Text
- Shrinking the Accountability Deficit in Capital Charging, in Oxford Handbook of Prosecutors, 565 (edited by Russell Gold, Kay Levine & Ronald Wright, Oxford University Press, 2021). Full Text
- How Not to Lie About Affirmative Action, 67 UCLA Law Review 834 (2020). Full Text
- Metrics of Mayhem: Quantifying Capriciousness in Capital Cases, in The Eighth Amendment and its Future in a New Age of Punishment, 266 (edited by Meghan Ryan & Will Berry, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Full Text
- Reexamining the Link between Parental Knowledge and Delinquency: Unpacking the Influence of Adolescents’ and Parents’ Perceptions (with Heather Scheuerman & Jessica Grosholz), 40 Deviant Behavior 703 (2019). Full Text
- When Criminal Coping is Likely: An Examination of Conditioning Effects in General Strain Theory (with Robert Agnew), 34 Journal of Quantitative Criminology 887 (2018). Full Text
- Disentangling Disparity: Exploring Racially Disparate Effect and Treatment in Capital Charging, 45 American Journal of Criminal Law 95 (2018). Full Text
- Disciplining Death: Assessing and Ameliorating Arbitrariness in Capital Charging, 49 Arizona State Law Journal 137 (2017). Full Text
- Race, Place, and Capital Charging in Georgia, 67 Mercer Law Review 529 (2016). Full Text
- Un-Gregg-ulated: Capital Charging and the Missing Mandate of Gregg V. Georgia, 11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 145 (2016). Full Text
- Leveraging Death, 103 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 475 (2013). Full Text
- Does Victimization Reduce Self-Control? A Longitudinal Analysis (with Robert Agnew, Jessica Grosholz, Deena Isom, Heather Scheuerman, and Lesley Watson), 39 Journal of Criminal Justice 169 (2011). Full Text
- Do Frustrated Economic Expectations and Objective Economic Inequity Promote Crime? A Randomized Experiment Testing Agnew’s General Strain Theory (with Nicole Leeper-Piquero, Alex R. Piquero, and Cesar J. Rebellon), 6 European Journal of Criminology 47 (2009). Full Text
- A General Strain Theory of Racial Differences in Criminal Offending (with Robert Agnew, Joanne M. Kaufman, and Cesar J. Rebellon), 41 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 421 (2008). Full Text
- Determining ‘Reasonableness’ without a Reason? Federal Appellate Review Post-Rita v. United States, 75 University of Chicago Law Review 1885 (2008). Full Text
- The Nonlinear Effects of Parental and Teacher Attachment on Delinquency: Disentangling Strain from Social Control Explanations (with Robert Agnew), 21 Justice Quarterly 763 (2004). Full Text
- A General Strain Theory Approach to Families and Delinquency (with Robert Agnew and Cesar J. Rebellon), in Families, Crime and Criminal Justice, (edited by Greer L. Fox and Michael L. Benson, JAI Press, 2000). Full Text