Professors Aldana, Elmendorf elected to the ALI
Professors Raquel Aldana and Christopher Elmendorf have been elected to the American Law Institute. Widely considered the nation’s most prestigious non-governmental legal-reform organization, the institute oversees projects that often form the basis of laws and become standards cited in judges’ opinions, legal briefs and scholarly articles.
Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017 to serve as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity with a law faculty appointment. She returned to full-time law teaching in 2020. Aldana’s research has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights.
Her most recent books include the co-edited volume From Extraction to Emancipation: Development Reimagined, published by Carolina Academic Press and the American Bar Association, and the third edition of Understanding Immigration Law, with UC Davis Law Dean Kevin R. Johnson and Professor Leticia Saucedo, and Bill Ong Hing and Enid Trucios-Haynes.
Before arriving at UC Davis, Aldana was Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship and a professor of law at McGeorge School of Law. Previously, she was a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. From 2006-07, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala.
Since starting at UC Davis, Aldana has received numerous awards, including the American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, the UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community, and the UC Davis Office of Research and Policy for Equity Ubuntu Award for Inspiring Social Change. In 2019, Aldana was selected as an inaugural fellow of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities’ Academia de Leverage.
Aldana holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Arizona State University.
Elmendorf, a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, joined the UC Davis Law faculty in 2004. His varied teaching and research interests include election law, property and land-use law, statutory interpretation and administrative law.
He has published widely in top law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, New York University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, California Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and Cornell Law Review, as well as leading peer-reviewed political science journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Political Research Quarterly and Political Behavior.
His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the MIT Election Science & Data Lab, and an Interdisciplinary Research Grant from the UC Davis Committee on Research.
Elmendorf holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Oberlin College.
UC Davis Law now counts 21 faculty members and emeriti in the ALI, which caps total membership at 3,000. The others are Dean Kevin R. Johnson, Senior Associate Dean Afra Afsharipour, Professors Ashutosh Bhagwat, Gabriel “Jack” Chin, William Dodge, Elizabeth Joh, Thomas Joo, Courtney Joslin, Lisa Pruitt, and Leticia Saucedo, and Professors Emeriti Alan Brownstein, Carol Bruch, Joel Dobris, Daniel Fessler, Angela Harris, Robert Hillman, John Oakley, Edward Rabin and Daniel Simmons.