Biography
Bibliography | Courses
 |
Gerald López
Professor of Law
B.A. University of Southern California, 1970
J.D. Harvard, 1974
UCLA Law faculty since 1978
lopez@law.ucla.edu
|
Gerald López is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He teaches Transforming Legal Education?, a Problem Solving Workshop, a Clinical in Community Outreach, Education and Organizing, as well as a Seminar in Legal Education. For over two decades, he has been the nation’s leading theorist about lawyering as problem solving. He has developed and championed the “rebellious vision” of progressive practice – not only for lawyers but for every individual and institution engaged in problem solving work. For nearly three decades, he has been among the country’s leading on-the-ground practitioners of and advocates for comprehensive and coordinated legal and non-legal problem solving in low-income, of color, and immigrant communities. Before returning to UCLA School of Law where he began his academic career, López was a Professor of Law at New York University and, before that, at Stanford University. He co-founded at Stanford the Lawyering for Social Change Program and at UCLA the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, among the nation’s first sequenced curricula in public interest work. He is the author of Rebellious Lawyering, perhaps the most influential book ever written about progressive law practice and community problem solving. He has been honored with many community, civil rights, and teaching awards.
Since the time he co-founded his own community-based law office in 1975, López has worked with diverse communities and problem solvers and has played central roles in economic initiatives, prisoner programs, reentry programs, policy reforms, civil rights litigation, outreach and education and organizing campaigns, and major empirical research studies. He speaks across the nation, conducts trainings, and writes regularly about problem-solving practices, race and culture, economic development, reentry, health care, immigration, legal education, and emerging social, economic, and political issues. He consults on how to design and manage legal and non-legal organizations serving low-income, of color, and immigrant communities.
