Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin Appointed to Edward L. Barrett Chair

Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin, a prolific and much-cited criminal and immigration law scholar whose work has addressed many of the most pressing social issues of our time, has been appointed as the Edward L. Barrett Endowed Chair of Law at UC Davis School of Law. 

"Professor Chin is an outstanding teacher and groundbreaking legal scholar whose work engages critical contemporary issues in immigration, civil rights, and criminal law," said Dean Kevin R. Johnson.  "UC Davis School of Law is fortunate to have him as part of our faculty, and we are pleased to be able to recognize his achievements with the Edward L. Barrett Endowed Chair."

The Barrett Chair, endowed in 1992 to honor the contributions of UC Davis School of Law's founding Dean Edward L. Barrett, Jr., was established to support the teaching, research, and service of the holder.  Professor Chin succeeds Professor Edward J. Imwinkelried, a world-renowned evidence expert and outstanding legal educator who relinquished the chair when he retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, Chin is a teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law. His scholarship has appeared in the Penn, UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties law reviews and the Duke and Georgetown law journals among others.  The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on collateral consequences of criminal conviction in Chaidez v. United States, in which the Court called his Cornell Law Review article "the principal scholarly article on the subject" and in Padilla v. Kentucky, which agreed with his contention that the Sixth Amendment required defense counsel to advise clients about potential deportation consequences of guilty pleas. Recently, Chin was cited in Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion in Utah v. Strieff, a case concerning Fourth Amendment rights and police searches.  In 2016, he was named among the "Twenty Most-cited Criminal Law & Procedure Faculty in the United States, 2010-2014" in a study by University of Chicago Law School Professor Brian Leiter.

Professor Chin teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Immigration, and works with students on professional projects. He won honors for his leadership of the successful petitioning of the California Supreme Court on behalf of Hong Yen Chang, who was denied a license to practice law in California more than a century ago as a result of laws that discriminated against Chinese immigrants. The Court posthumously granted a law license to Chang in March 2015.

Professor Chin earned a B.A. at Wesleyan, a J.D. from Michigan and an LL.M. from Yale. He clerked for U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in Denver and practiced with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and The Legal Aid Society of New York. He most recently taught at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law before joining the UC Davis faculty in 2011.

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