We are so pleased to welcome Mesa Refuge alum, author and law professor Lara Bazelon to our Board of Directors.

Lara is an associate professor of law and the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. From 2012-2015, she was a visiting associate clinical professor at Loyola Law School and the director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. She was a trial attorney in the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Los Angeles for seven years. Lara graduated cum laude from Columbia University and spent her junior year at Cambridge University in England studying English literature. She graduated cum laude from NYU School of Law.

As a 2017 Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation Criminal Justice Fellow at the Mesa Refuge, Lara used her residency to complete her well-received book Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction (Beacon Press 2018). The Mesa Refuge is committed to writers that are on the cutting edge of topics that animate the well-being of our civil society and civic culture, and Lara is one of those people: she has engaged significantly in issues of mass incarceration and in that process used her talents to give voice to so many that are unheard.

In 2019, Lara established Mesa Refuge’s Register Fellowship in Restorative Justice to encourage talented writers in the field of restorative justice.

“Mesa Refuge holds a special place in my heart,” Lara said. “I’m looking forward to working with the Mesa Refuge Board of Directors.”