Ann Southworth

Professor of Law

Co-Director, Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession
Joint appointment in Criminology, Law & Society

Ann Southworth

Expertise:

Legal profession, professional responsibility, public interest law, conservative legal movement and cause lawyers

Background:

Professor Southworth teaches and writes on the legal profession and lawyers who serve causes, with an emphasis on lawyers’ norms, professional identities, practices, organizations, and networks.  She participated in designing UC Irvine School of Law’s required first year course on the American legal profession, and is the co-author, with Catherine Fisk, of an interdisciplinary textbook, The Legal Profession, which is now in its 2nd edition.  She has published numerous articles on civil rights and poverty lawyers, lawyers involved in national policy-making, and advocates for conservative and libertarian causes, as well as a book on the conservative legal movement, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (University of Chicago Press 2008). Her new book, Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending, explores the roles that lawyers, advocacy organizations, and their patrons have played in the creation of Supreme Court doctrine invalidating campaign finance laws on First Amendment grounds. It was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2023. 

Prior to joining the founding faculty at UC Irvine School of Law, she was a law professor at Case Western Reserve and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation.  She has been a visiting professor at Harvard and UCLA. She clerked for Judge Stanley A. Weigel and practiced at Morrison & Foerster, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the U.S. Department of Justice.  She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University.

Prior Courses:

Issues of Accountability for Lawyers and the Legal Profession, Legal Profession, Legal Profession: Advanced Topics, Civil Procedure, Cause Lawyering

(Log in to view full course descriptions in the UCI Law Course Catalog)

Prof. Southworth's Scholarly Papers on SSRN

  • January 2025
    Invited speaker, AALS Annual Meeting panel on “More Money Than Ever: Campaign Finance Law and American Democracy”
  • October 2024
    Invited lecture, “Big Money Unleashed,” University of Amsterdam
  • November 2024
    Invited lecture, “$peech,” University of Leeds, U.K.
  • April 16, 2024
    Speaker, Book talk presented by the Fordham Voting Rights and Democracy Project at Fordham University School of Law
  • January 6, 2024:
    Big Money Unleashed: Author-Meets-Reader, AALS Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.
  • August 31, 2023:
    “Integrating Normative and Empirical Perspectives in Legal Ethics Training,” Research Committee on Sociology of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
  • March 22, 2023:
    Discussant, Workshop on “Populism, Non-State Actors, and Legal Mobilization in Europe,” European University Institute, Florence 
  • March 30, 2023:
    Commentator, Book panel for Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers, American Shtetl (Princeton U. Press 2021), USC Center for Law, History, and Culture
  • March 22, 2023:
    Discussant, Symposium on “Populism, Non-State Actors, and Legal Mobilization in Europe," European University Institute in Florence
  • Awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London for Fall 2024.