Joseph Fishkin, an expert in election law, constitutional law, and employment discrimination law, has joined the faculty of UCLA School of Law. Fishkin, author of the award-winning book Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (Oxford University Press, 2014), will be teaching four courses in the coming year: Election Law, Employment Discrimination Law, a seminar on Direct Democracy, and a Law Through Scholarship course on Law and Economic Inequality.

Fishkin joins UCLA Law after a decade at the University of Texas School of Law, where he served as the Marrs McLean Professor in Law. He has also been a visiting professor at Yale Law School. Fishkin is a political theorist as well as a legal scholar and often works on questions at the intersection of law, distributive justice, and political economy.

He is the co-author, with Texas Law faculty member and former UCLA Law professor William Forbath, of the forthcoming book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2022). The book argues for recovering a tradition of American constitutional arguments against concentrations of economic and political power.

Fishkin’s other writing has appeared in publications including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and Supreme Court Review. He blogs at Balkinization.

Fishkin received his B.A. in ethics, politics, and economics, summa cum laude, from Yale University, his J.D. at Yale Law School, and his D. Phil. in politics at Oxford, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. After law school, he clerked for Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and was a Ruebhausen Fellow at Yale Law School.