Meet the Faculty: Race, Gender and Policing Program

For this month's Scholarship Highlights, we are doing a special piece on Boyd Law's Race, Gender, and Policing Program faculty. Professor Frank Rudy Cooper leads this newly created program, and it focuses on how factors like race and gender are related to policing and the criminal justice system. Professor Cooper and his colleagues recently leveraged the program to host a conference earlier this month—Black Legal Futurism. The two-day event hosted by Boyd Law centered on the future of policing from the point of view of African Americans in Southern Nevada. 

Of the program, Professor Cooper says, "I am excited to have all the people involved and different roles in the law school represented." Passionate about his scholarship work, he has a future California Law Review article coming out in June: Dicta, Pretext, and Excessive Force: Toward Criminal Procedure Futurism. This piece is about figuring out ways to create a second criminal procedure revolution, asking the question, "What would it take to create an expansion of rights, and what should they be?"

Addie Rolnick is the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Professor of Law; Faculty Director, Indian Nations Gaming & Governance Program; and Associate Director, Program on Race, Gender, and Policing. She says, "My work looks at the way Native people interact with tribal, federal, and state legal systems, including the criminal system." Professor Rolnick recently published Excluded and Erased: The Conspicuous Absence of Native Children in Research on School Discipline Disparities; she is working on a book called Colonization, Crime, and Justice, which will examine the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the criminal system.

Stewart Chang, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, moderated a panel at the Black Legal Futurism panel on how arts and culture relate to Afrofuturism. He recently wrote a book chapter and will give an upcoming talk at the "With Pride: LGBTQ+ Rights & Advocacy in Legal Education Summit" at the Gonzaga University School of Law on LGBTQ+ rights in Singapore and Taiwan. “The values of the Program in Race, Gender, and Policing have always resonated with my work as an attorney, educator, and scholar," Professor Chang says, "and I am happy Boyd Law is investing in a program that thinks deeply about these issues."

Eve Hanan, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research; Director of the Misdemeanor Clinic; Professor of Law, recently published a Cardozo Law Review article entitled Terror and Tenderness in Criminal Law. "Many criminal legal reforms fail because they rely on prosecutors and sentencing judges to be lenient with only a few, meritorious defendants,” she says. “This individualized approach to reform changes nothing, and worse--it actually provides window dressing that conceals the ongoing harshness of the larger criminal legal system."

Justin Iverson, Assistant Professor and Research Librarian, joined Boyd Law in 2021 after spending five years as a law librarian in a correctional facility. Professor Iverson's experience lends a unique lens to the program, through which he revived the LEAP program (Legal Education and Assistance in Prisons). He says, “In LEAP, law students are trained to prepare legal information guides to help incarcerated persons understand and interact with the civil and criminal legal systems on a more even footing." He recently coauthored a publication entitled Cops or Coaches? The Statutory Role of Juvenile Probation Officers in a Transformative Age for the Michigan State Law Review and is set to speak at the upcoming LWI Biennial Conference. 

Patience A. Crowder, Professor of Law and Director, Entrepreneurship & Economic Justice and Small Business Clinic, is a new addition to the Boyd Law team. Hired to start the Economic Justice and Small Business Clinic, her work looks at non-litigation and business law avenues to help promote community economic development in under-resourced communities. Professor Crowder will soon release Embedding Racial Justice in the Work of Environmental Non-Profits (coauthored and presented with Prof. Tom Romero at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law); presented at LatCrit 2023 Biennial Conference and forthcoming in The Seattle Journal for Social Justice. She says, “I am excited to join such a talented team of scholars, lawyers, and critical thinkers who are so passionate about teaching.”

Click here to learn more information about the Boyd Law Race, Gender, and Policing Program.