Lara Bazelon

Lara Bazelon is a Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law where she directs the Criminal & Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics and holds the Philip and Muriel Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy. She is the author of three books as well as numerous essays, op-eds, and long-form journalism pieces. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Magazine, and New York Magazine, among other outlets.

• Wrongful convictions
• Clinical teaching
• Trial advocacy
• Criminal procedure

• Criminal law
• Criminal procedure
• Restorative justice
• Wrongful convictions
• Ethics

• Chair, SFDA Innocence Commission

• New York University, JD
• Columbia University, BA

• Visiting Associate Clinical Professor, Loyola Law School
• Director, Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent
• Clinical Fellow, UC Hastings College of the Law
• Deputy Federal Public Defender, Los Angeles
• Law Clerk, Honorable Harry Pregerson

• Davis Vanguard Justice Award - The award was given to the Racial Justice Clinic for our work with the district attorney's office exonerating the wrongfully convicted and resentencing the excessively sentenced (2021).
• Senior Fellow, Schuster Institute for Ethics and Investigative Journalism (2016-2019).
• Mesa Refuge Writer-in-Residence and Langeloth Fellow (June 2017).
• MacDowell Writer-in-Residence (March-April 2016).
• Black Women Lawyer’s Association of Los Angeles Community Service Award (2014) (accepted on behalf of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent for the exoneration of Kash Delano Register).
• Aleph Institute Award of Distinction (2012).

• Ambitious Like a Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids (Little, Brown Spark, April 2022)
• A Good Mother (Hanover Square Press 2021)
• Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, October 2018)

Book Chapters

• “Systemic Racism: Defining Terms and Evaluating Evidence,” in Renewing America’s Civic Compact (Lexington Books 2023 eds. Carol McNamara & Trevor Shelley)
• "David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart. Has reality caught up to the "Murder Police"?." In Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning (Ecco/HarperCollins 2023), ed. Sarah Weinman.

• “Exonerations: Causes, Consequences and Remedies,” Annual Review of Criminology (forthcoming 2025, co-authored with Professor Richard Leo).
• “Ground Rules: Giving Meaning and Effect to Contested Terms in the California Racial Justice Act", Santa Clara Law Review (forthcoming 2025, co-authored with Professor Beth Redbird and Assistant Professor Belle Yan).
• "History in the Making: The University of San Francisco Racial Justice Clinic," 17 California Legal History Journal 27 (2022).
• “Restorative Justice From Prosecutors' Perspective,” Fordham Law Review (2020).
• “Victims' Rights from a Restorative Perspective,” 17 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (forthcoming 2020). (co-authored with Bruce Green) Victims' Rights from a Restorative Perspective SSRN
• “Ending Innocence Denying,” 47 Hofstra Law Review 393 (2018). Ending Innocence Denying SSRN
• “The Long Goodbye: After the Innocence Movement, Does the Attorney Client Relationship Ever End?,” 106 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 681 (2017). SSRN
• “For Shame: The Public Humiliation of Prosecutors by Judges to Correct Wrongful Convictions,” 29 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 305 (2016).
• “Hard Lessons: The Role of Law School Clinics in Addressing Prosecutorial Misconduct,” 16 Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law 388 (2011).
• “Putting the Mice in Charge of the Cheese: Why Federal Judges Cannot Always Be Trusted To Police Themselves and What Congress Can Do About It,” 97 Kentucky Law Journal 439 (2009).
• “Exploding the Superpredator Myth: Why Infancy is the Best Defense in the Modern Juvenile Court,” 75 NYU Law Review 159 (2000). (Recipient, Paul D. Kaufman Memorial Award for best student Note)