With deep expertise in the law of prisoners’ rights, UCLA School of Law assistant professor Aaron Littman is poised to engage in further cutting-edge research with the support of a prestigious fellowship that goes to the most promising pre-tenure faculty members across all fields of study, throughout University of California system.

The Hellman Fellows program supports “the research of assistant professors who show promise for great distinction in their chosen fields across each of the 10 UC campuses. … The expectation is that the award will contribute substantially to the professional growth of each fellow. The most important aspect of the selection is the quality of the research rather than the popularity of the field of study.”

Littman is one of 22 rising professors who were selected from a wide pool of talented applicants. His fellowship comes with a significant cash award to further his research, which he will conduct during the 2024-25 academic year.

“My project will offer the first scholarly consideration of the roles that federally mandated disability-rights protection and advocacy systems – known as P&As – can and sometimes do play in advancing the rights of incarcerated people,” Littman says. “There is virtually no legal scholarship on this important topic. I’m so grateful for the support of the Hellman fellowship, which will allow me to dive deep into the topic.”

This research expands on Littman’s existing scholarship, including his 2022 article in the Yale Law Journal, “Free-World Law Behind Bars.” That work previously earned the Criminal Justice Junior Scholar Award from the Association of American Law Schools’ criminal justice section.

Littman joined UCLA Law in 2019 as a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow. He became an assistant professor in 2022. At UCLA Law, he has launched the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and serves as deputy director of the Behind Bars Data Project, for which he received UCLA’s Public Impact Research Award. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School and an M.Phil. in criminological research from the University of Cambridge. After law school, he clerked on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Other UCLA Law faculty members who received a Hellman fellowship early in their careers include professors LaToya Baldwin Clark, Sunita Patel, and Beth Colgan.