Mario Barnes, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Co-Director of the UC Irvine Law Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEAR), has been elected the next President of the Law and Society Association (LSA). He will begin the two-year term as President following the LSA annual meeting in 2025. LSA is the largest sociolegal organization in the world. Global and interdisciplinary in scope, it connects scholars from across disciplines who share a common interest in the role law plays in societal, political, cultural, and economic life.
“I am humbled and deeply honored to have been elected the next president of the Law and Society Association,” said Mario Barnes. “The Association has been my intellectual home for over two decades and I, like many others, have benefited immeasurably from the group of scholars that gather together under its banner to produce impactful sociolegal work. I look forward to working with the outstanding LSA staff, trustees, executive board and membership to advance the organization’s vision and continued support for innovative, interdisciplinary and global law and society research.”
“Mario Barnes has been a leader throughout the legal academy and with law and society scholars for decades,” said UC Irvine School of Law Dean Austen Parrish. “It’s a natural and wonderful step for him to serve as president, and his election underscores his many contributions to the field. We are deeply proud of Mario and all his numerous accomplishments and know he will make an extraordinary contribution as president.”
About Mario BarnesProfessor Mario Barnes is a nationally recognized scholar for his research on the legal and social implications of race and gender, primarily in the areas of employment, education, criminal and military law. He is one of the leaders and organizers within the school of academics seeking to build stronger connections between empirical studies and Critical Race Theory. He is currently co-editor of an upcoming volume of the Law and Society Review dedicated to exploring synergies between empirical methods and critical race theory (eCRT) and sociolegal studies. He writes and teaches in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, national security law, and race and the law. Prof. Barnes returned to UC Irvine School of Law in spring 2022 after serving as the Toni Rembe Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law from 2018 to 2021.
I am humbled and deeply honored to have been elected the next president of the Law and Society Association. The Association has been my intellectual home for over two decades and I, like many others, have benefited immeasurably from the group of scholars that gather together under its banner to produce impactful sociolegal work.Mario BarnesChancellor’s Professor of Law
At UC Irvine School of Law, Prof. Barnes taught the inaugural class in 2009 and was instrumental in developing the Law School’s curriculum and sense of community. Additionally, he served as the second senior associate dean for academic affairs, the first associate dean for faculty development and research, and helped launch the Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEAR). Before joining UC Irvine School of Law, he was a faculty member at the University of Miami School of Law; prior to that, he was a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin School of Law.
Before entering academia, Prof. Barnes spent 12 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy, including service as a prosecutor, defense counsel, special assistant U.S. attorney, and on the commission that investigated the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. He retired from the Navy in 2013, after 23 years of combined active and reserve service.
Prof. Barnes earned both a bachelor’s degree (1990) and a J.D. (1995) from UC Berkeley, and an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin (2004). He was founder, Managing Editor and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the African-American Law & Policy Report (now Berkeley Journal of African-American Law and Policy).
Prof. Barnes is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice. He received the AALS Ferguson Award in 2015 and was honored with the AALS Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award in 2008. In 2023, he, along with his UCI Law colleague, Professor Kaaryn Gustafson, received the American Bar Foundation Fellows Outstanding Scholar Award, given for those who have engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or in government.
About UC Irvine’s Leadership in the Socio-Legal CommunityThe University of California, Irvine has long had a deep connection with the Law and Society Association (LSA). Many of our faculty — at the Law School and across campus — are leading scholars in the LSA. Among the Law School faculty, Prof. Veena Dubal is a current member of the LSA Board of Trustees and Profs. Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Mario Barnes and Kaaryn Gustafson previously served as trustees. Prof. Shauhin Talesh serves as General Editor of the Law and Society Review (LSR) and Profs. Ballakrishnen, Mario Barnes, Dalié Jiménez and Emily Taylor Poppe currently serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of LSR.
LSA has also consistently recognized our faculty’s scholarship and service — Prof. Ballakrishnen is a recipient of the LSA Global Collaboration Grant and a prior awardee of the Herbert Jacob Book Prize (Honorable Mention); Prof. Gustafson has won the Ronald Pipkin Service Award, the Herbert Jacob Book Prize and the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award; Prof. Ari Ezra Waldman is a recipient of a 2024 LSA Programming Grant and has won the LSA Article Prize; and Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus Bryant Garth has won two Herbert Jacob Book Prizes and the Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize.
UC Irvine also has significant socio-legal programming: UC Irvine’s Center in Law, Society and Culture hosts a regular interdisciplinary Socio-Legal Studies Workshop, the Center on Globalization, Law and Society plays an important role in showcasing global law and society issues, socio-legal research plays a prominent role in the UC Irvine School of Law curriculum, and students may choose an emphasis in Law, Society, and Culture.
Original source can be found here.