Cynthia Merrill is a Lecturer at UCLA Law School, where she designs and directs programs in legal analysis, writing and research for LL.M. candidates and the M.L.S. program. She also teaches constitutional and statutory law, torts, advanced written advocacy, and American Law in a Global Context. She has been honored with UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Drawing on constitutional, narrative and feminist theory, her research has focused on the construction of the legal subject in reproductive rights issues, anti-discrimination law, and autobiographical legal scholarship.

Prior to joining the Law School, Merrill practiced complex civil and appellate litigation for over a decade, including constitutional challenges to the federal statute governing Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy proceedings and multi-district consumer class actions. As part of her extensive pro bono practice, she headed up her firm’s team in a nationwide consortium of public interest and private law firms working to develop affirmation litigation to curb gun violence. She litigated a challenge to a Southern California municipality’s failure to comply with statutory affordable housing laws, resulting in hundreds of new units of affordable housing—for which Public Counsel named her team Advocate of the Year in 2009. She also served as an attorney supervisor in UCLA Law’s Ninth Circuit Appellate Clinic, representing immigrants on asylum and other appeals.

Merrill received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Submissions Editor for the Yale Law Journal and an Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. She clerked for the Honorable George H. King, U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

Prior to her legal career, Merrill earned a doctorate in English from the University of Washington and taught at UCLA for many years in Writing Programs, Gender Studies, the Honors Collegium, and English. She served as a consultant for faculty developing writing intensive courses in the College of Arts and Sciences and led seminars in writing pedagogy for graduate teaching assistants.

From 2010 to 2023, Merrill was a Research Scholar and Affiliate with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Her work has appeared in Fictional Discourse and the Law (ed. Hans J. Lind), Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, and California History, among other publications.