Lara Bazelon

Lara Bazelon 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’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of ethics and criminal justice advocacy. She is the co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Ethics, Gideon & Professionalism Committee. In January 2017, she was selected to serve a three-year term on the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Council.

Professor Bazelon is a contributing writer for Slate and Politico Magazine, where her long-form journalism and opinion pieces appear regularly, including a long-running series in Slate on issues arising from wrongful convictions. Her essays and op-eds have also been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times.

Her book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, was published in October 2018. She is the recipient of a writer-in-residency award from the MacDowell Colony in 2016 and from Mesa Refuge in 2017, where she was named the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Fellow for excellence in writing about issues relating to the criminal justice system.