Juan Carlos Ibarra

Professor Ibarra is an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. His teaching and scholarship focus on the intersection of property law, wealth, and racial equality. In his teaching, Professor Ibarra emphasizes a student-centered approach that develops analytical skills while situating foundational doctrines within broader questions of equity and social justice. He teaches Property and Wills and Trusts.

Professor Ibarra’s research examines how formally neutral rules in private law shape access to wealth and power. His recent and forthcoming work develops a framework for analyzing property and private law as systems that structure inclusion and exclusion across generations. His current projects include Racial Legal Entitlements: Rethinking Property Law Pedagogy, which offers a conceptual framework for understanding how law defines what counts as legal injury, and Citizenship and the Domestic–Foreign Trust Distinction, which examines how federal tax classification rules governing trusts disadvantage families based on citizenship status in the use of family trusts.

• Property law
• Trusts and estates
•  Law and inequality

• Co-Chair, Antiracism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (2024-2025)

• Columbia Law School, JD, 2011
• University of California, Santa Barbara, BA in History of Public Policy, 2006

• Racial Legal Entitlements and Heirs’ Property, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review (forthcoming 2027)
• Revisiting Integrating Spaces: Racial Legal Entitlements and the Reorientation of Property Law Education, Journal of Legal Education (forthcoming 2026)