UCLA School of Law assistant professor Alexander Arnold has earned two honors that go to outstanding early-career scholars. He has been recognized with a Society of Hellman Fellowship, which goes to the most promising pre-tenure faculty members across all fields of study, throughout University of California system. And he recently presented his work at the prestigious Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum at Yale Law School.

Arnold’s scholarship focuses on the history of “how law knows” – how legal institutions attempt to use, and generate, knowledge about the world outside of the courtroom. Because of this cutting-edge work, Arnold was selected from a large pool of potential honorees for both programs.

For 2026-27, he is one of 20 Hellman Fellows from UCLA. The fellowship supports “the research of assistant professors who show promise for great distinction in their chosen fields across each of the 10 UC campuses. … The expectation is that the award will contribute substantially to the professional growth of each fellow. The most important aspect of the selection is the quality of the research rather than the popularity of the field of study.”

“My research explores the history of truth-seeking in civil litigation, from the birth of the common law in the 12th century through the present day,” Arnold says. “Although seeking the truth is amongst courts’ most important functions, there is surprisingly little scholarship on the history of legal truth-seeking. This history can help us better understand not only how our legal institutions took the form they have but also how they might be reformed, and so I am deeply grateful for the support of the Hellman Society as I head into the archives.”

During the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, which took place in May, Arnold was one of nine professors – selected from 159 submissions – who presented their work and received comments from a senior faculty member and others. Arnold’s paper, which is forthcoming the Stanford Law Review, was titled, “So, to the Country: Truth-Seeking and the Birth of the Common Law.”

A prolific writer and speaker, Arnold often relies on his fluency in several languages to place legal history and economics in a global context, with projects encompassing issues in the United States, England, and Continental Europe. He joined UCLA Law in 2023, is a member of the American Society for Legal History, and is a co-convenor of UCLA’s Legal History Workshop. He served on the advisory board of the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History and was a fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. He earned his B.A., Ph.D. in history and French studies, and J.D. degrees from NYU. After law school, he worked in litigation at a firm in NYC and clerked on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Other UCLA Law faculty members who received a Hellman Fellowship early in their careers include professors LaToya Baldwin Clark, Sunita Patel, Beth Colgan, Aaron Littman, and Fanna Gamal.