A Unique Partnership
Supporting collaborative research and teaching to improve legal and policy analysis in the 21st century.
A unique partnership of UCLA Law and the RAND Corporation, the Center supports collaborative research promotes legal and policy research grounded in multidisciplinary empirical analysis to guide legal and public policymakers in the 21st century.
The people at UCLA Law and RAND share a long history of collaborative research: In the late 1960s the research team working on criminal justice at RAND included Professor Norman Abrams; in the early 1980s Professor George Priest was instrumental in the creation of the Jury Verdicts Database for the RAND Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ), and Professor Gary Schwartz served as an ICJ consultant and peer reviewer. This tradition continues under the umbrella of the UCLA-RAND Center, with topics as varied as medical malpractice, class actions, employment discrimination and institutional reform.
In recent years the Center has increased its focus on law and policy research in Los Angeles. One of the Center's largest ongoing current projects is a large-scale data collection and analysis project on civil justice in Los Angeles Superior Courts. The Center also recently facilitated a collaboration between the UCLA Law's Criminal Justice Program and RAND researchers on a study of the existing county jail mental health population to identify those who would likely be eligible for diversion to community-based services based on the relevant legal and clinical factors.
The Center has also recently expanded its curricular offerings, developing new courses on Policy Analysis and Advocacy at UCLA Law and teaching PhD students at the Pardee RAND Graduate School courses on gerrymandering and other law and policy topics. Students interested in law and policy research and coursework should contact the Center Co-Directors about current and future offerings.