2019 UCLA Law Review & BruinX Symposium: “Latinx Communities, Race, and the Criminal Justice System”

➡ Please find more information and the full conference program at the UCLA Law Review Symposium website

Organized by UCLA Law Review and BruinX

Faculty Co-Sponsors: Devon Carbado, Jennifer Chacón, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Sherod Thaxton

Organizational Co-Sponsors: Cornell Death Penalty Project, Criminal Justice Program, Critical Race Studies Program, David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, La Raza, Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, Prison Law & Policy Program

The UCLA Law Review’s annual Symposium draws leading practitioners and scholars from across the nation to a forum where they exchange ideas on a topical issue of the day. Through the Symposium, we explore problems relevant to social groups that are represented in the current legal dialogue and to those that are not.

The central question we intend to explore is: How does bias against Latinos affect the criminal justice system’s processes and outcomes? Across disciplines, and particularly in law, scholars have paid scant attention to this question. The experiences of Latinos remain thoroughly marginalized in debates about race and criminal justice.

This symposium will examine different stages of the criminal justice system: policing; pre-trial detention and bail; assistance of counsel; voir dire; plea bargaining; guilt determinations; sentencing decisions, including capital sentencing decisions; and appeals in the Latinx context. The question will also be examined through different disciplinary lenses: How does the history of the lynching of Mexicans impact Mexican Americans’ pleas today? How does biased cognitive processing affect the weighing of evidence against Latino defendants? How are the social-psychological processes of decisionmaking altered by the presence or absence of a Latino juror in a case with a Latino defendant? How has the doctrinal prohibition against striking jurors on the basis of race been applied in cases involving Latino defendants? These and other questions are the subject of the Symposium. We hope you will join us.

Funding Generously Provided by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. By attending this event, you may earn MCLE credit in the amount of up to 7.5 hours of Recognition and Elimination of Bias in the Legal Profession and Society credit.