Five outstanding professors are boosting the excellence and breadth of UCLA School of Law’s faculty as they join the law school this fall and in the coming year. Alexander Arnold, Shirin Bakhshay, Ariela Gross, K-Sue Park and Laura Pedraza-Fariña bring expertise in areas including law and economic theory, criminal adjudication and punishment, international organizations, property and legal history, race and civil rights. The law school is pleased that these new community members will play a substantial role in the growth and impact of UCLA Law’s teaching and scholarship in the years ahead.

Alexander Arnold
Arnold’s scholarship uses tools of intellectual and legal history to explore the relationship between law, economic theory and social facts. He joins the faculty as an assistant professor of law. Arnold 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. 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 work in trial and appellate litigation.
Read more about Professor Arnold.

Shirin Bakhshay
Bakhshay, a legal scholar and social psychologist whose research focuses on criminal adjudication and punishment processes, joins UCLA Law as an assistant professor of law. She comes to UCLA Law from Stanford Law School, where she was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and lecturer in law since 2020. 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.
Read more about Professor Bakhshay.

Ariela Gross
Gross joins the law school’s faculty as a distinguished professor of law. A renowned scholar of legal history, she 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.”
Read more about Professor Gross.

K-Sue Park
Park will join the law school faculty in January as a professor of law. This is a homecoming for Park, who comes to UCLA Law most recently from Georgetown University Law Center, and who was a critical race studies fellow and lecturer at UCLA Law from 2017 to 2019. An award-winning and widely published scholar and author, Park focuses her research on how American property law and the American real estate market have developed vis-à-vis the histories of colonization and enslavement.
Read more about Professor Park.

Laura Pedraza-Fariña
Pedraza-Fariña will come to UCLA Law in 2024 as a professor of law. She has been on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law since 2013. To better understand how innovation happens on the ground, Pedraza-Fariña’s research approaches intellectual property law from a sociological perspective, leading her to identify objective markers of creative inventions that can inform the patent granting process, fostering breakthrough innovation. She also looks at the intersection of global health and international intellectual property law.
Read more about Professor Pedraza-Fariña.