Biography
Ariela Gross is a Distinguished Professor of Law and History at UCLA and teaches Contract Law, Constitutional Law, Enslavement and Racialization in U.S. Legal History, as well as other courses on race and legal history. She is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on the ways race, racism, and slavery have shaped law, politics, and culture in the Americas.
Gross is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, with Alejandro de la Fuente (Cambridge UP 2020), winner of the Order of the Coif award for the best book in law, and the John Philip Reid Book Award for the best book in legal history by a mid-career or senior scholar. Her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard UP 2008), was co-winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association for the best book in sociolegal history, and the Lillian Smith Award for the best book on the U.S. South and the struggle for racial justice, the American Political Science Association’s Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gross is also the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton UP 2000), and numerous articles and essays.
A graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School, Gross received her PhD in History from Stanford University. She came to UCLA Law from USC Gould School of Law, where she was the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History, and Co-Director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture.
She has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Tel Aviv University, Kyoto University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Paris, and a recipient of fellowships from the J. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library. She is working on a new book, Erasing Slavery: How Stories about Slavery and Freedom Shape Battles over The Constitution, which will be published by Beacon Press in 2026.
