Professor Soucek Elected to the American Law Institute

Professor Brian Soucek has been elected to the American Law Institute, the nation’s premier non-governmental law reform organization. UC Davis Law now counts 26 current or emeriti faculty in the ALI.

A professor of law and UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow, Soucek joined the King Hall faculty in 2013. Before arriving in Davis, he clerked for the late Mark R. Kravitz, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut, and the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He previously taught for three years in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and co-chair of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

Soucek’s published work spans from constitutional and statutory anti-discrimination law to refugee/asylum law to research at the intersection of law and aesthetics. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Circuits, referenced and excerpted in leading casebooks in immigration law, civil procedure and sexual orientation law, discussed by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and honored with the Dukeminier Award from UCLA’s Williams Institute for the year’s best article on sexual orientation and gender identity law.

At King Hall, he has taught Constitutional Law II: Equal Protection and the First Amendment; Civil Procedure; Antidiscrimination Law; Asylum and Refugee Law; Art Law; and an undergraduate first-year seminar on free expression.

A member of the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Soucek previously chaired the University of California’s system-wide Committee on Academic Freedom. He was a fellow with UC’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, led the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Law and the Humanities, and served a three-year term as trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics. 

He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was comments editor for the Yale Law Journal, a Coker Fellow in Procedure and won the Munson Prize for his work in the school’s immigration clinic; a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, where he received the Core Preceptor Prize for his teaching; and a B.A. in philosophy and economics from Boston College. 

Soucek’s book The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.