Faculty Scholarship & Influence

 AT LMU LOYOLA LAW SCHOOL

LMU Loyola Law School faculty undertake research and scholarship targeted to change the world. Their scholarly work is internationally, nationally, and locally connected, cross-disciplinary, and launched in scholarly publications with notably wide reach. Here is just a sampling of some of what Loyola faculty have been working on of late: 

Professor Kaiponanea Matsumura's scholarship advances a pluralistic conception of intimacy in family law and interrogates laws that shape and govern the experiences of Asian Americans. In his recent article Advancing Consensual Non-Monogamy in Psychological Research, Practice, and Policy: A Guide for Psychologists  (with Amy C. Moors, et al.) in the Social Issues & Policy Review (2024), he identifies ways that research in psychology can advance legal rights for people in consensually non-monogamous relationships.

His forthcoming article Against Stability in the Vanderbilt Law Review identifies and critiques courts' invocations of stability across family law contexts.

Matsumura’s forthcoming chapter Asians, Law, and the American Family in Race, Racism, and the Law (Aziza Ahmed & Guy-Uriel Charles eds., Edward Elgar Publishing) explores the exclusion of Asian American experiences from the family law canon, and his forthcoming article (with Erin Suzuki) Asian Americans and the Harm of Exceptionalized Inclusion in the Cornell Law Review uses the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College as a point of departure to understand how the model minority paradigm frustrates Asian Americans' ability to establish themselves as meaningful subjects.

Matsumura recently presented his work at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health global conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Professor Justin Levitt, a scholar of the law of democracy, recently returned from White House service as the nation’s first Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights. His work situating the representational impact of current and historic census controversies, titled The Census, is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Election Law (Eugene D. Mazo ed., Oxford University Press). Levitt’s works in progress include an article on race, coalition districts, and redistricting, and a book project interrogating the social determinants of democracy. 

Levitt is especially busy during this time as he advises nonprofits on election-related litigation and leads Loyola’s program to place students as official poll workers on Election Day.

Professor Katie Pratt advances thinking in tax law toward justice, including exploring issues related to race and gender and health and aging. Pratt’s recent book chapter Making the Best of Long-Term Care for Seniors is forthcoming in Law and the 100-Year Life (Anne Alstott & Abbe Gluck eds., Cambridge University Press).

Pratt recently co-organized (with Bridget Crawford) a symposium for the American Tax Policy Institute, “It’s a Man’s World: Revealing and Addressing Hidden Gender Bias in Tax Law and Policy,” held in Washington, D.C. (and virtually) in October.

Professor Tristin Green studies discrimination and institutions. Her essay Collective Complaint, forthcoming in the American Journal of Equality Law, questions the dominant frame of collective complaint as primarily group-based working together and urges legal efforts aimed at allowing individuals to tell broader stories and to seek broader reform.

Her works in progress include an article in which she exposes a troubling shift in antidiscrimination law toward measuring individual harm. She is also co-authoring (with Camille Gear Rich) a chapter for the multi-volume series Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession (UC Press).

Professor Michael Serota researches and writes about the development and reform of the criminal law. His current research includes several grant-funded interdisciplinary projects that bring together experts from across academia and the policy world. One of these projects, The Criminal Minds Project, conducts the first-ever nationally representative survey—of more than 6,000 U.S. residents—on public attitudes about mens rea. In another project, Legislating Criminal Justice Reform, he is undertaking a systematic content analysis of more than three decades of legislative debate.

Serota recently presented his work at leading U.S. conferences in the fields of law, political science, and criminology, as well as to multidisciplinary audiences in the United Kingdom and in Germany. 

Professor Amy Motomura’s scholarship focuses on patent law’s role in innovation and on the design of patent law institutions and doctrine. Her current projects include The Inventorship Fallacy forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review. The Inventorship Fallacy builds upon Motomura’s earlier work about patent law’s unique treatment of repeat applicants (Innovation and Own Prior Art in the Hastings Law Journal). The Inventorship Fallacy questions the traditional understanding of inventors in patent law and argues that inventorship doctrine is incoherent when confronted with the more complex, full picture of inventors.

Professor Kevin Lapp researches and writes about criminal law and procedure, punishment, and immigration law. He recently co-edited (with Kathleen Kim and Jennifer L. Lee) the book Feminist Judgments: Immigration Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press) in addition to co-writing an article Critical Immigration Legal Theory forthcoming in the Boston University Law Review.   

In his forthcoming article Sentencing Insurrection in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Lapp examines American punishment through the lens of the January 6 Capitol Breach prosecutions, taking an empirical look at the sentencing outcomes in those cases for insights about modern criminal justice and the rule of law.