UCLA School of Law faculty members Laura E. Gómez, Blake Emerson, and Aaron Littman have earned prestigious section awards that are presented during the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.

The honorees join UCLA Law Distinguished Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was recognized with the Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and to the Law.

Gómez earned the Clyde Ferguson Award from the AALS minority groups section. She is a professor of law who holds the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law. A leading scholar in the intersection of law, politics, and inequality, she joined UCLA Law in 1994 and co-founded and has served as the faculty director of the law school’s Critical Race Studies program. She is the author of many articles and books, including Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press, 2007) and Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020).

Emerson received the AALS administrative law section’s Emerging Scholar Award. He is an assistant professor of law at UCLA Law, which he joined in 2018. An authority in administrative law, structural constitutional law, and political theory, he has published widely, including the book The Public’s Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), which offers a history and theory of democracy in the American administrative state.

Littman was honored with the Criminal Justice Junior Scholar Award from the AALS criminal justice section. He received the award on the basis of his paper “Free-World Law Behind Bars,” which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. Littman is a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law, where he focuses on litigation and policy advocacy challenging the actions of police and prison and jail officials. Since joining the law school in 2019, he has launched the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and served as deputy director of the COVID Behind Bars Data Project.

The 2022 annual meeting of the AALS is taking place virtually through Jan. 9.