UCLA School of Law professors Jon Michaels and Joanna Schwartz have been elected to the membership of the American Law Institute, among the most prestigious positions for legal academics and professionals.

The ALI is the “leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.” Its wide array of projects and publications include restatements of the law and other heavily researched compendia “that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.”

The UCLA Law faculty now includes 19 ALI members.

A widely admired authority on administrative and constitutional law, Michaels engages in scholarship and teaching that also focuses on national security law, the separation of powers, presidential power, regulation, bureaucracy and privatization. He joined the UCLA Law faculty in 2008 and is a two-time winner of the American Constitution Society’s Cudahy Award for scholarly excellence in administrative law. He is a frequent legal affairs commentator for national and local media outlets, and his book Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic (Harvard University Press, 2017) earned wide acclaim. His next book, which he is writing with David Noll, centers on the resurgence of legal vigilantism and vigilantism’s threat to American democracy. It will be published in October.

Michaels holds degrees from Williams College, Oxford University (as a Marshall Scholar) and Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He previously worked as an associate handling national security and public policy matters at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C.

Schwartz is one of the nation’s leading experts on police accountability. At UCLA Law, she serves as the faculty director of the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, and she teaches Civil Procedure and courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. She joined UCLA Law’s faculty in 2006, received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015 and was the law school’s Vice Dean for Faculty Development from 2017 to 2019. She is a frequent commentator in the national media, and her book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (Viking, 2023) was published last year. Her articles have also been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review and several other premier publications.

As part of her ALI service, Schwartz will be an advisor on the constitutional torts restatement, and she was previously an advisor on the principles of law, policing, restatement.