Outstanding new members boost law school faculty and administration in 2023–24.

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New Tenure-Track Faculty

ARIELA GROSS
Distinguished Professor of Law

A renowned scholar of legal history, Ariela Gross comes to UCLA Law from USC Gould School of Law, where she was the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and founder and co-director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture. Gross served on the University of Southern California faculty for 27 years.

A prolific and award-winning writer and speaker, Gross focuses her scholarship on “the way race and slavery have shaped law, culture and politics in the Americas — and also the way law has created the very category of ‘race,’ with devastating consequences.” She is the author of three books that she says “tell the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones, challenging slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery”: With Alejandro de la Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020); What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard University Press, 2010); and Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton University Press, 2000). She is currently working on a book to be titled Erasing Slavery: How Stories of Slavery and Freedom Shape Battles Over the Constitution.

Gross has been the recipient of several prestigious honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, and book awards from the Order of the Coif for the best book on law and the Law and Society Association for the best book on sociolegal history.

Deeply engaged in service to her community and profession, Gross chaired the Concerned Faculty of USC group, which was created in 2018 “to restore transparency, accountability and faculty governance at the university.” She also co- founded the Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop for Junior Scholars.

Gross earned her B.A. from Harvard University, her J.D. from Stanford Law School and her Ph.D. in history from Stanford University.

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K-SUE PARK
Professor of Law

K-Sue Park will join the law school’s faculty in January 2024. The move is a homecoming for Park, who served as a critical race studies fellow and lecturer at UCLA Law from 2017 to 2019. She comes to UCLA Law most recently from Georgetown University Law Center, where she has been an associate professor of law since 2019.

An award-winning and widely published scholar and author, Park focuses her research on how U.S. property law and the U.S. real estate market have developed vis-à-vis the histories of colonization and enslavement. Her articles have appeared in The University of Chicago Law Review, The Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review. Her forthcoming book, under contract with Harvard University Press, has the working title How the Land Made Us: The Untold Story of Race and Property Law in America. As a public intellectual, Park has had work published in The New York Times, among other prestigious publications.

Deeply engaged in on-the-ground legal advocacy, Park has worked for, among other impactful engagements, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid in El Paso as an Equal Justice Works fellow and staff attorney; the Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in New York City.

Park is a climate cohort fellow with the Emerson Collective. She was the 2022–23 Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., and Annette L. Nazareth Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2003, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Seoul, South Korea.

Park earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Cornell University; an M.Phil in social and political sciences, with distinction, from the University of Cambridge; a Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley; and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

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LAURA PEDRAZA-FARIÑA

Professor of Law

Laura Pedraza-Fariña, a scholar whose work focuses on the cutting edge of developments in science and technology, will join the faculty in January 2024.

She comes to UCLA Law from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. She has been a member of that law school’s faculty since 2013, including as a professor of law and, since 2021, associate dean for innovation and partnerships. Previously, she was a visiting lecturer and law research fellow at Georgetown University Law Center.

To better understand how innovation happens on the ground, Pedraza-Fariña’s research approaches intellectual property law from a sociological perspective. This work has led her to identify objective markers of creative inventions that can inform the patent granting process, fostering breakthrough innovation. At the same time, Pedraza-Fariña engages in research and scholarship that centers on the intersection of global health and international intellectual property law. For example, a recent project analyzes the relationship between the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, whose overlapping regulatory domains lead to a sometimes contentious relationship.

A prolific and widely published author, Pedraza-Fariña has written on these topics in publications that include Iowa Law Review, The University of Chicago Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review and the History of Science Society flagship journal Osiris. She also co-authored the book No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador (Harvard University Press, 2010).

She earned her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School; her Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University; and her B.A. in chemistry, with honors, from Oberlin College. She also previously worked as an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., and as a consultant with the public health watch division of the Open Society Institute (now called Open Society Foundations) in New York City.

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ALEXANDER ARNOLD
Assistant Professor of Law

Alexander Arnold’s scholarship uses tools of intellectual and legal history to explore the relationship between law, economic theory and social facts. He often relies on his fluency in several languages to place legal history and economics in a global context, with projects encompassing issues in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

A prolific writer and speaker, Arnold has presented academic talks that have most recently included “Judicial Economics, Civil Procedure, and the Rise of Economics in Antitrust Law” and “Economic Facts Before Law.” His in-progress writing includes “A History of Judge as Economic Regulator: Procedure and Economic Regulation From Bushell’s Case to the New Deal” and “Law and Economics Before ‘Law & Economics.’” His work has been supported by such institutions as the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the History of Science Society and the Remarque Institute.

Arnold is a member of the American Society for Legal History, and he served on the advisory board of the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History. He comes to UCLA Law from a clerkship with Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and from work in trial and appellate litigation in New York. He also previously held positions as a fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Center for the Administration of Criminal Law, and he served as an instructor in history and law at New York University.

Arnold earned his B.A., Ph.D. in history and French studies, and J.D. degrees from NYU.

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SHIRIN BAKHSHAY
Assistant Professor of Law

Shirin Bakhshay is a legal scholar and social psychologist whose research focuses on criminal adjudication and punishment processes. She comes to UCLA Law from Stanford Law School, where she was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and lecturer in law from 2020 to 2023.

An award-winning scholar, writer and teacher, Bakhshay has written articles and delivered presentations on the psychological impact of the criminal justice system, including issues involving jail isolation, torture and pretrial publicity. Her current scholarship examines the psychology of punishment and explores lay beliefs toward the criminal justice system and their implications for sentencing law and penal policy. Her forthcoming article “The Dissociative Theory of Punishment” will appear in The Georgetown Law Journal. A work in progress, with Joanna Weill and Craig Haney, is titled “Social Distance, Public Attitudes, and Prison Reform.” Including her fellowship at Stanford Law School, Bakhshay has taught courses in psychology and the law at Mills College, where she was an assistant adjunct professor of practice, sociology and public policy, and at UC Santa Cruz. Previously, she was a litigation attorney with O’Melveny & Myers in San Francisco, where her work included white-collar defense in criminal and civil investigations, high-stakes commercial litigation and pro bono criminal appellate work.

Bakhshay earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation was titled “Satisfying the Urge to Punish: Exploring Attitudes Towards Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Incarceration.” She also holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.S. in psychology from UC Santa Cruz and a J.D. from Yale Law School.