2022 Inaugural Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy ("GO LILA") Workshop
Laura E. Gómez
Laura E. Gómez is the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA. She holds courtesy appointments in UCLA’s Departments of Sociology and Chicana/Chicano & Central American Studies. After graduating from Harvard College, she received her J.D. and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford in the early 1990s, becoming the first Mexican American woman in the U.S. to earn a J.D.-Ph.D. She clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson and was a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Gómez is a nationally recognized expert on anti-Latino racism, Latinx people and the law, critical race theory, and the sociology of race. She serves on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino scholarly advisory committee. In 2021 she won the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award. Her books include Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism; Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race; Mapping Race: Critical Research on Health Disparities; and Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure. Inventing Latinos appeared on NPR’s best books of 2020 list and will be released in paperback in August 2020. Gómez co-founded UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program and has twice served as faculty director. She is an affiliate of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Latin American Institute. Gómez was previously a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, where she was the first person to hold a joint appointment in the School of Law and the College of Arts & Sciences, where she appointed in the American Studies Department. She has served in many leadership positions, including president of the Law and Society Association, interim dean of UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences, vice dean of the UCLA law school, and associate dean of the UNM law school. She has held residential fellowships at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Stanford Humanities Center in Palo Alto.
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