Law Teaching Faculty

Anderson Faculty | Affiliated Faculty | Law Faculty | Faculty Research Fellows

Law Teaching Faculty

	Stuart Banner, Professor of Law Stuart Banner teaches Property, American Legal History, a clinical on Capital Punishment, and a variety of other courses. In law school, Professor Banner was articles editor of the Stanford Law Review. Upon graduation, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell and then at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City. Before coming to UCLA, he taught for eight years at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Banner's most recent books are The Death Penalty: An American History (2002) and Legal Systems in Conflict: Property and Sovereignty in Missouri, 1750-1860 (2000).

	Taimie L. Bryant, Professor of Law Taimie Bryant teaches Property, Nonprofit Organizations, and Animals and the Law. Professor Bryant published several articles on Japanese law, focusing primarily on family law in Japan. However, since 1995 she has been interested primarily in animal law. She has taught classes in that subject since 1995, and, in 1998, she was the lead drafter of California state legislation to shift animal sheltering from killing to saving lives. That legislative work resulted in her serving as a consultant regarding the extent to which the animal shelter legislation was a state mandate requiring reimbursement of local government. She also wrote two articles about the legislation and its aftermath. Professor Bryant is currently writing articles that concern issues of theory in animal law. In a paper entitled “Trauma, Law, and Advocacy for Animals,” Professor Bryant draws on social science and medical literatures that document the traumatic effects of witnessing violence that society has not yet recognized. She applies that literature in the context of advocates for animals, arguing that some forms of legal activism that seem ineffective for helping animals actually increase public activism and understanding of animal suffering, thereby making other forms of legal change more likely. More recently, Professor Bryant is utilizing the literature of social justice activism in feminism and disability rights areas in order to inform activism for animals. In particular, she seeks to combine the approaches of radical feminism and social justice activism in her work on animal protection. Professor Bryant earned a doctorate in anthropology from UCLA. She uses her training in anthropology to inform her work on nonprofit organizations, animal law, and property law. She is also developing projects that combine social science with law with funds from a generous endowment by Bob Barker to UCLA Law School for the purpose of animal rights law teaching and scholarship.

	Anne E. Carlson, Professor of Law Ann Carlson, who recently served as the school's Academic Associate Dean, teaches Property and Environmental Law, co-directs the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic and is a founding faculty member of the Public Interest Law and Policy Program. Her scholarship in environmental law focuses on important constitutional questions affecting environmental law and policy, including standing, federalism and preemption, as well as on the role social norms play in affecting environmentally cooperative behavior. She also edits the Southern California Environmental Report Card, published by UCLA's Institute of the Environment. Professor Carlson's article Takings on the Ground was selected in 2003 by the Land Use and Environmental Law Review as one of the ten best recently-published articles in the country. Prior to joining the faculty in 1994, Carlson practiced law for Hall & Phillips, specializing in public interest, environmental and consumer litigation. She was also employed in various offices of California state government, including the California Senate Office of Research and the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee. Professor Carlson received her B.A. magna cum laude from UC Santa Barbara in 1982 and her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

	Susan Fletcher French, Professor of Law Susan French teaches Property, Wills and Trusts, Land Use Regulation, and Common Interest Communities. Her areas of expertise include the law of wills, trusts, future interests, servitudes (easements and covenants) and common interest communities. After graduating from law school, where she was articles editor of the Washington Law Review, Professor French practiced law in Seattle, Washington, and then joined the UC Davis law faculty in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School in 1980, the UCLA School of Law in 1988-89, Harvard Law School in 1990, Duke Law School in 2001, and University of North Carolina in 2005. She spent a sabbatical year at the University of Chile in Santiago during 1982-83 and part of a sabbatical leave at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law in 2002. Professor French was the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Third, Property (Servitudes) (2000); serves as an adviser to the Restatement of the Law, Third, Property (Donative Transfers); and has advised the California Law Revision Commission on revision of laws relating to common-interest developments and the Probate Code. She is co-author of Cases and Texts on Property (with Casner, et al., 5th ed. 2004) and Community Association Law (with Hyatt, 1998).

	Sean B. Hecht, Executive Director, Environmental Law Center Sean B. Hecht is the Executive Director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center at UCLA School of Law. He co-directs the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic and directs the activities of the Evan Frankel Law and Policy Program, which include research and education on governance, regulation, and environmental policy. He has also taught Public Natural Resources Law and Policy at the School of Law. Before he attended law school, he worked in the nonprofit sector, overseeing environmental programs relating to recycling and hazardous waste. After law school, he served as law clerk for Hon. Laughlin E. Waters of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He began law practice at the firm Strumwasser & Woocher, litigating cases involving election law, employment law, environmental and land-use law, and insurance regulation. More recently, he served for three years as a Deputy Attorney General for the California Department of Justice, representing the Attorney General and state agencies on environmental and public health matters. He has taught at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at U.C. Santa Barbara. He is a member of the Executive Committees of both the State Bar of California Environmental Law Section and the Los Angeles County Bar Environmental Law Section. Currently, he is on the executive committees for environmental law of the state and county bars, and works to build connections between academia and the community of practicing environmental lawyers.

	Stephen R. Munzer, Professor of Law Stephen Munzer teaches Contracts, Property, and courses and seminars in legal philosophy and biotechnology. The American Philosophical Association awarded him the David Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship for 1997-98 and the Berger Prize in the Philosophy of Law in 1999. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1991. Professor Munzer studied philosophy at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Yale Law School and was an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he taught in the philosophy department of Rutgers University before entering law teaching. His interests include Christian theology and sports. Professor Munzer's current research interests include intellectual property, biotechnology, and body modification. He is working on a book with Russell Korobkin on stem cell research and the law. He is the author of the magisterial A Theory of Property (1990) and editor of New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property (2001).

	Richard Sander, Professor of Law Sander has been working on questions of social and economic inequality for nearly all of his career. He was born in Washington, D.C., but spent most of his childhood in small towns in northwest Indiana. After earning a B.A. in Social Studies at Harvard, Sander in 1978 joined the federal Vista program and worked for a small neighborhood housing group on Chicago's south side. While organizing tenant unions and building receiverships, he was deeply impressed with the work of the South Shore Bank, an experimental, community-development bank owned by churches and foundations. Sander secured funding from three federal agencies and, with the Woodstock Institute, completed the first detailed study of the bank. South Shore Bank was widely imitated as an instrument for community revitalization in other urban areas over the next two decades. Sander attended graduate school at Northwestern University from 1983 to 1988, earning degrees in law (J.D., 1988) and economics (M.A. 1985, Ph.D., 1990). In an his law review comment and his dissertation, Sander sought to understand why fair housing laws had seemingly produced widespread integration in some American metropolitan areas, but very little integration in most. During much of this period, Sander served on the board of the Rogers Park Tenants Committee, and worked on the election effort and subsequent transition team of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. In 1989, Sander joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. During this period, he continued his work on housing segregation, but also pursued two new interests: the reasons behind the American legal profession’s explosive growth since the mid-1960s, and the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. With Kris Knaplund, he published in 1995 the first comparative evaluation of academic support programs used in legal education. After California voters approved Propostion 209 in 1996 – banning the use of race in various government programs, including admissions at the University of California – Sander successfully argued for the adoption of class-based preferences in the law school’s admissions, and published a study on the results of this experiment in 1997. During the 1990s, Sander was involved in several Los Angeles civic initiatives. He served as President of the Fair

	Kirk J. Stark, Professor of Law Kirk Stark teaches Federal Income Taxation, Taxation & Distributive Justice, Financing State and Local Government, and the first-year Property course. In addition, he has regularly served as faculty coordinator the UCLA Colloquium on Tax Policy & Public Finance. Professor Stark was elected Professor of the Year by the law school graduating classes of 1999 and 2002. In 2003, he received the University Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Stark’s interest in tax began during his first year of law school, when he published a student note titled Rethinking Statewide Taxation of Nonresidential Property for Public Schools. He later served as the Chief Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal and took first prize in the American Journal of Tax Policy student writing competition for an article on the role of transition rules in tax policy. Professor Stark writes in the areas of tax policy and public finance. Much of his recent scholarship has examined the American system of “fiscal federalism” and considers how best to allocate fiscal responsibilities among federal, state and local governments. Stark was recently chosen as a 2006-2007 Fellow for the UCLA Center for American Politics and Public Policy. He will be working on a project titled Rich States, Poor States: American Federalism and the Politics of Fiscal Equalization. The study examines fiscal disparities among the U.S. states and considers whether the federal government should adopt a Canadian-style system of equalization grants to alleviate those disparities. Professor Stark was recently elected to a three-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Tax Association, a nonpartisan organization founded in 1907 to promote the study of tax policy and public finance.

	Michael H. Schill, Dean and Professor of Law Dean Schill is a national expert on real estate and housing policy, deregulation, finance and discrimination. He has written or edited three books and over 40 articles on various aspects of housing, real estate and property law. He is an active member of a variety of public advisory councils, editorial boards and community organizations. Before joining the faculty of UCLA School of Law, Dean Schill was the Wilf Family Professor in Property Law at New York University School of Law and professor of urban planning at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. From 1994 to 2004, Dean Schill served as the director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Prior to that, Schill was a tenured professor of law and real estate at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.


	Jonathan M. Zasloff, Professor of Law Jonathan Zasloff teaches Torts, Land Use, Environmental Law, Comparative Urban Planning Law, Legal History, and Public Policy Clinic - Land Use, the Environmentand Local Government. He grew up and still lives in the San Fernando Valley, about which he remains immensely proud (to the mystification of his friends and colleagues). After graduating from Yale Law School, and while clerking for a federal appeals court judge in Boston, he decided to return to Los Angeles shortly after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, reasoning that he would gladly risk tremors in order to avoid the average New England wind chill temperature of negative 55 degrees. Professor Zasloff has a keen interest in world politics; he holds a PhD in the history of American foreign policy from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University. Much of his recent work concerns the influence of lawyers and legalism in US external relations, and has published articles on these subjects in the New York University Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More generally, his recent interests focus on the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses. Professor Zasloff has long been active in state and local politics and policy. He recently co-authored an article discussing the relationship of Proposition 13 (California's landmark tax limitation initiative) and school finance reform, and served for several years as a senior policy advisor to the Speaker of California Assembly. His practice background reflects these interests: for two years, he represented welfare recipients attempting to obtain child care benefits and microbusinesses in low income areas. He then practiced for two more years at one of Los Angeles' leading public interest environmental and land use firms, challenging poorly planned development and working to expand the network of the city's urban park system. He currently serves as a member of the boards of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a state agency charged with purchasing and protecting open space), the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (the leading legal service firm for low-income clients in east Los Angeles), and Friends of Israel's Environment. Professor Zasloff's other major activity consists in explaining the Triangle Offense to his very patient wife, Kathy.