Lara Bazelon

Lara Bazelon (born February 14, 1974) is an American academic and journalist.

She is a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the Criminal & Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics.

She is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles.

Her clinical work as a law professor focuses on the exoneration of the wrongfully convicted.

Bazelon graduated cum laude from Columbia University in 1996, and received her J.D. from NYU School of Law where she was an editor of the NYU Law Review.

Her note, Exploding the Superpredator Myth, won the Paul D. Kaufman Memorial Award and was cited by Bryan Stevenson in his Supreme Court brief in Sullivan v. Florida, where he successfully argued that the Eighth Amendment forbade the sentencing of juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed before the age of 13.

After law school Bazelon worked as a law clerk for the Honorable Harry Pregerson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

After seven years as a trial attorney in the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Los Angeles, Bazelon was awarded a clinical teaching fellowship at the UC Hastings College of the Law.

From 2012 to 2015, Bazelon was a visiting associate professor and the director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles.

While leading the Loyola Project for the Innocent, Bazelon was the lead counsel for Kash Register, who was exonerated on November 7, 2013, for a murder he did not commit after 34 years imprisonment.

Her long running series on wrongful convictions has appeared in Slate since 2015 and her Innocence Deniers article was Slate's cover story in 2018.

A feminist and progressive Democrat, she also regularly draws criticism from the left for her critiques of other Democrats and progressive-leaning institutions.

Her New York Times op-ed "Kamala Harris Was Not A 'Progressive Prosecutor'" sparked nationwide debate.

Register won a $16.7 million judgment from the city and county of Los Angeles in 2016, the largest settlement in the history of Los Angeles.

In 2017, Bazelon joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco School of Law as an associate professor and the director of the Criminal and Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics.

She is the author of two nonfiction books: Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction (Beacon Press 2018) and Ambitious Like a Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good For Your Kids (Little Brown 2022), and the author of the novel A Good Mother (Hanover Sq. Press 2021).

Bazelon grew up in Philadelphia.

Her father is an attorney and her mother is a psychiatrist.

She attended Germantown Friends School, where she was on the tennis team.

She has three sisters: Emily Bazelon, an award-winning New York Times journalist and author; Jill Bazelon, who founded an organization that provides financial literacy classes free of charge to low income high school students and individuals; and Dana Bazelon, senior policy counsel to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

The Bazelon family are Jewish.

Bazelon is the granddaughter of David L. Bazelon, formerly a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and second cousin twice removed of feminist Betty Friedan.

In 2018, Bazelon began filing bar complaints against prosecutors whom judges had found to have committed misconduct.

But as Radley Balko wrote in the Washington Post, Bazelon met with no success: "none of the eight complaints resulted in significant disciplinary action."

Bazelon told the Washington Post she was particularly troubled by the case of Jamal Trulove, who was wrongfully convicted due to the misconduct of Assistant District Attorney Linda Allen.

After the Court of Appeal overturned Trulove's conviction, Allen was allowed to retry him.

Following his acquittal, Trulove sued the city and county of San Francisco and received a $13.1 million judgment.

The State Bar of California took no action against Allen in response to Bazelon's complaint.

Represented by the law firm Jones Day, Bazelon took a writ to the California Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case by a vote of 5–1 with one justice recusing himself.

Bazelon's scholarship examining issues at the intersection of criminal justice and ethics as well as restorative justice as an alternative to incarceration, has been published in The Fordham Law Review, the Hofstra Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Bazelon is quoted frequently in national and local media as an expert on criminal justice issues.

She serves as a voting member of the ABA Criminal Justice Section's Council, the policymaking body for the organization on criminal justice issues.

Bazelon writes regularly about criminal justice issues with a particular focus on how the legal system is affected by racism, sexism, and other biases.

She has written for The Atlantic about the gender bias female trial lawyers face and how the felony murder rule disproportionately impacts women and people of color.

In 2019, she was awarded tenure.

From 2019 to 2021, Bazelon and her law students at the University of San Francisco School of Law represented Louisiana prisoner Yutico Briley Jr., who was sentenced to 60 years with no possibility of parole at the age of 19 for an armed robbery he did not commit.

The story of Briley's exoneration — and the collaboration of Lara and her sister Emily Bazelon in helping to bring it about — was the cover story of the New York Times Magazine in July 2021, written by Emily Bazelon.

Joaquin Ciria was freed after the San Francisco District Attorney's Innocence Commission, chaired by Bazelon, reinvestigated Ciria's case and recommended that the District Attorney seek to overturn his conviction.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Brendon Conroy vacated Ciria's conviction on April 18, 2022, and he was released from jail on April 20, 2022, having serving 31 years in prison.

In 2020, she was awarded the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy.