Sharon Dolovich

Professor Dolovich is currently focused on two projects: an empirical study of the LA County Jail’s practice of segregating vulnerable prisoners for their own protection, and a critical examination of Eighth Amendment doctrine as it applies to prison sentences and prison conditions.  Works in progress include: Two Theories of the Prison: Accidental Humanity and Hypermasculinity in the L.A. County Jail; Some Puzzles about Eighth Amendment Deliberate Indifference; and The Supreme Court’s Prison Problem. 

Dolovich’s other major articles include: State Punishment and Private Prisons, 55 Duke L. J. 437 (2005) and Legitimate Punishment in Liberal Democracy,  7 Buff. Crim. L. Rev. 307 (2004).  The latter was selected for the 2004 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum as the best article in both criminal law and jurisprudence & philosophy—the first article ever to be selected in two categories. In 2005, she was honored by the Cornell University Program on Ethics and Public Life with its Young Scholar Award.

Professor Dolovich spent 2005-06 as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and 2007-08 as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.  She has testified before both the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons and the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. She served as a consultant during the settlement phase of Johnson v. California, 543 U.S. 499 (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court case concerning racial segregation in the California prisons. She created and co-edits the SSRN journal Corrections & Sentencing Law & Policy Abstracts, and her writing has appeared on the op/ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Professor Dolovich has also written in the field of legal ethics.  Her article, Ethical Lawyering and the Possibility of Integrity, appeared in volume 70 in the Fordham Law Review.

She will spend the 2009-10 academic year as a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center.