Jamelia Morgan, an acclaimed scholar and teacher who focuses on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment, has joined the UCLA School of Law faculty as a professor of law.

Morgan will be a core faculty member of the Critical Race Studies program. She comes from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where she was a professor of law and director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice.

Morgan’s work spans issues involving civil rights, race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. She describes her scholarship and teaching as taking a close look at “the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder, and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status.”

A prolific and award-winning speaker and author, her publications include several articles on disability rights law and civil rights that have appeared in leading journals including the Columbia Law Review, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review.

Before she joined the Northwestern law faculty, Morgan served as a professor at UC Irvine School of Law and the University of Connecticut School of Law, and as a visiting professor and senior Liman Fellow affiliate at Yale Law School.

She also previously worked extensively in the civil rights space, including as associate director of the African American Policy Forum, the leading social justice think tank that was co-founded by UCLA Law distinguished professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as with the ACLU of Mississippi and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She also serves on the boards of several organizations, including the Abolitionist Law Center and Rights Behind Bars.

Morgan earned her B.A. in political science and M.A. in sociology from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Thereafter, she clerked on the U.S. District Court for the District of the District of Columbia. She is a proud graduate of California public schools and John A. Rowland High School in Rowland Heights.