Brian Highsmith, whose research focuses on the design of local- and state-level democratic institutions in the United States, has joined the UCLA School of Law faculty as an assistant professor.

He comes to UCLA Law from Harvard Law School, where he was an academic fellow in law and political economy. Before that, he was a fellow in law and public policy at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. He is currently a Steven M. Polan fellow in constitutional law and history with the Brennan Center and an affiliated senior researcher at Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law.

Highsmith is also a Ph.D. candidate in government and social policy at Harvard. His work focuses 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. He has past or forthcoming publications in the Stanford Law Review and Duke Law Journal, as well as The American Prospect and The New York Times.

His current academic research explores how populist reformers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era – indebted farmers, labor unions, and rural socialists – used state constitutions to challenge the political influence of dominant corporations.

Highsmith earned his B.A. from Furman University and J.D. from Yale Law School.

He served as a Skadden Fellow at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), where his litigation and advocacy challenged the unaffordable financial obligations that are imposed by private companies on poor families due to their contact with the criminal system. He also worked in Washington, D.C., on domestic economic policy, including at President Obama’s National Economic Council, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the office of Sen. Cory Booker.