UCLA School of Law Professor Adam Winkler has been named a 2021-22 visiting scholar by Phi Beta Kappa. Winkler is one of 13 people representing a wide array of fields of academic expertise who were selected as visiting scholars this year.

Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor societies. The Visiting Scholar Program has since 1956 “offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars.” Each year, visiting scholars go to more than 100 colleges and universities where they spend two days “taking full part in the academic life of the institution. They meet informally with students and faculty members, participate in classroom discussions and seminars, and give a public lecture open to the academic community and the general public.”

A member of the UCLA Law faculty since 2002, Winkler is the Michael J. Connell Professor of Law and consistently ranks as one of the legal scholars who are most cited by courts across the country. An expert in constitutional law, particularly the Second Amendment, he is a frequent speaker and writer in the media and legal academy on gun rights, the Supreme Court, and more. At UCLA Law, he teaches Constitutional Law, Gun Rights, Professional Responsibility, and the Supreme Court Simulation course, which recently hosted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Winkler’s book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the California Book Award, and it won the Scribes Book Award. He also wrote Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W.W. Norton, 2011), which was released to wide acclaim.

Winkler holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, a master’s degree in political science from UCLA, and a J.D. from NYU School of Law. After graduation, he clerked for David Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a litigator at Katten Muchin in Los Angeles.