UCLA School of Law is pleased to welcome Brian Highsmith and Yutian An as assistant professors of law during the 2025-26 school year.

Law and government scholar Highsmith focuses his research on the design of local- and state-level democratic institutions in the United States. His work zeroes in on state constitutions, political geography, and fiscal federalism. Some of his recent projects have examined the governance of “company towns” in different historical eras, corporate location incentive megadeals, interactions between residential segregation and local fiscal capacity within U.S. metropolitan areas, and the role of courts in the American political economy.
Read more about Highsmith.

An is a scholar of comparative law and politics whose research lies at the intersection of criminal law, administrative law, and comparative law. She will join the faculty as an assistant professor in January 2026. She employs a variety of empirical research methods in her work, which examines how legal systems structure state-building activities, sociopolitical legitimization, and administrative entrenchment in both authoritarian and democratic regimes, with a focus on criminal law institutions.
Read more about An.