Three outstanding professors are boosting the excellence and breadth of UCLA School of Law’s faculty as they join the law school this fall. Alexander Arnold, Shirin Bakhshay and Ariela Gross bring expertise in areas including law and economic theory, criminal adjudication and punishment, 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.