UC Davis Law adds to its outstanding faculty in 2020-21

UC Davis School of Law has enhanced its acclaimed faculty for 2020-21.

After three years of excellent service as the campus’ Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity, Professor Raquel Aldana has transitioned to a full-time faculty appointment at UC Davis Law.

Aldana is a leading voice on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, and immigrant rights in the United States. This year, she will teach Criminal Law, Immigration Law, and Asylum and Refugee Law.

UC Davis Law also is pleased to welcome two outstanding teacher/scholars, Eric Fish and Alix Rogers, to the law faculty. They will begin teaching in spring 2021.

Fish’s primary research is in criminal law, with particular focus on the ethical duties of participants in the criminal process, the structure of immigration crimes, and the system’s emphasis on administrative efficiency. Fish’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review and Minnesota Law Review.

For the past four years, Fish has served as a public defender, first with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, later as a Federal Defender in San Diego. He received a J.D. and a Ph.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. After law school, he clerked for Judges Pierre Leval and Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He will teach Professional Ethics and Immigration Crimes in the spring.

Rogers’ scholarship centers on legal and bioethical issues related to property, torts and legal history. She is particularly focused on the regulation of human biological materials and emerging biotechnologies. She also has researched and published on the intersection of neuroethics and law. 

Rogers spent the past three years as a co-fellow between Stanford Law’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. Awarded a Gates Scholarship to attend Cambridge University, Rogers holds an M.Phil and is a candidate for a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge.

Her scholarship has appeared in the Boston College Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, American Journal of Bioethics and The Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. She will teach Property in the spring.

Bolstering its Legal Research and Writing program, the law school added a new instructor, Jennifer Elowsky. She taught Legal Research and Writing and Legal Methods at Golden Gate University School of Law. She is a partner at Wolkin Curran, LLP in San Francisco.

Robert Mullaney ’84 is UC Davis Law’s new Aoki Water Justice Clinic director. He previously served as Associate Regional Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and as Senior Counsel, Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. Last year, he was a staff attorney and associate professor for Golden Gate University School of Law’s Environmental Law and Justice Clinic. After law school, Mullaney clerked for then-California Supreme Court Justice (later UC Davis Law Professor) Cruz Reynoso.

In September, Chad Smith will join King Hall as the director of the Tribal Justice Project. Smith holds a J.D. from the University of Tulsa. He is the former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Smith also served as attorney general for the Tohono O’odham Nation.

In addition, many renowned scholars, judges and attorneys have joined UC Davis Law as adjunct and visiting faculty this year, including:

• Nair Flores, Vice President and Associate General Counsel of Intellectual Property at Lyft.
• Mira Sundara Rajan, former Canada Research Chair in Intellectual Property Law at the University of British Columbia, professor of intellectual property law at the University of Glasgow and visiting scholar at Stanford Law School.
• Lee Seale ’01, Chief Probation Officer for Sacramento County.