About

Sameer Ashar is a Clinical Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Workers and Tenants Law and Organizing Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. His scholarly work develops through collaborations with social movement formations, law students, co-counsel, and interdisciplinary groups, focusing on the interactions between law and social movements, political economy, and abolitionist thought. Ashar's research examines how law both structures and inhibits emancipatory change, with a particular emphasis on law's role in social justice and community organizing. He has published extensively in prominent law journals and is a co-author of chapters in a Stanford University Press book on immigration law. Ashar has served as a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and scholar-in-residence at King's College Dickson Poon School of Law, among other academic residencies. He has worked closely with community organizations and labor unions, supporting litigation, policy advocacy, and community education projects. Ashar founded and revamped several clinics focused on immigrant rights, workers, and tenants, and has been involved in numerous initiatives to advance social justice through legal education and community engagement. He has been a faculty member at UC Irvine since 2011, with prior roles at CUNY School of Law and NYU School of Law, and has held leadership positions including Vice Dean for Experiential Education at UCLA School of Law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Financial economics
• Economics
• Engineering
• Gender studies
• Engineering ethics
• Psychoanalysis

Selected publications

• Futures of Law, Lawyers, and Law Schools: A Dialogue

  University of Pittsburgh Law Review · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  On April 19 and 20, 2023, Professors Bernard Hibbitts and Richard Weisberg convened a conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law titled “Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected, and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.” Four speakers concluded the event with a spirited conversation about themes expressed during the proceedings. Distilling a lively two days, they asked: what are the most critical challenges now facing United States legal education and, by extension, lawyers and the communities they serve? Their agreements and disagreements were striking, so much so that Professors Hibbitts and Weisberg invited those four to extend their conversation in writing. The University of Pittsburgh Law Review graciously agreed to publish the result.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Futures of Law, Lawyers, and Law Schools: A Dialogue Authors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race, Ethnicity and the Legal Profession

  Hart Publishing eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Item does not contain fulltext

  PublisherDOI

• Shapeshifting Displacement: Notions of Membership and Deservingness Forged by Illegalized Residents

  Humanity · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development - ARTICLES REMOVED Volume 12, Number 3, Winter 2021

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Shapeshifting Displacement: Notions of Membership and Deservingness Forged by Illegalized Residents

  Humanity · 2021 · 9 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This paper considers how accounts produced by illegalized residents in the United States shapeshift US immigration enforcement regimes by defining narrators and their communities as “belonging.” Anthropologist Aimee Cox develops the notion of “shapeshifting” to refer to how groups that are deemed “social problems” redefine the institutions within which they are embedded. The illegalized residents interviewed for this paper redefined US immigration law and policy as arbitrary, racially biased, and exploitative, even as they argued that they deserved status in the United States. Such critiques and definitions of deservingness perform a politics of displacement, redrawing boundaries of belonging.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Democratic Norms and Governance Experimentalism in Worker Centers

  Law and Contemporary Problems · 2019-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  There is renewed focus on the means by which workers organize against extreme economic inequality and autocracy at work. Social movement organizations, first on their own and, more recently, in collaboration with labor unions, have originated creative sectoral bargaining strategies matched with workplace activism and direct action tactics. These organizations, called "worker centers" by activists, scholars, and funders, remain largely outside of the literatures on law and social movements, labor law, and non-profit law. These formations' increasing salience in civil society invites empirical study of whether or how they promote worker voice and autonomy. This paper reports findings of a preliminary foray into such a study. Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a mix of lawyers, executive directors, and organizers deeply involved in a variety of worker centers nationwide, we find these organizations are pluralistic in terms of their commitment to, and modes of incorporating, worker voice and worker leadership. We note variations among the organizations correlated with a range of factors, including racial, gender, lingual, and legal status characteristics of workers and organizational leadership. We find a major commonality among all organizations studied: worker centers pursue internal democracy because leadership deems it both instrumentally and intrinsically beneficial to the cause of improving working conditions and creating a more equitable political economy. We further examine implications of worker center governance models with regard to continuities and discontinuities with labor unions, in shaping organizational democracy and advocacy tactics, in confronting the "iron law of oligarchy," with regard to scalability, as affecting social and political democracy beyond the organization, and in relation to legal regulation and funding models.

  Publisher

• Access to Power

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The traditional approaches to “access to justice” obscure the current distribution of economic, social, and political power, and how that distribution favors those who have power and burdens those who do not. Consequently, the traditional approaches foreclose possibilities for a truly just society. In the law clinic we led together for five years, we developed models of lawyering with our students and community partners focused on how lawyers can contribute to the redistribution of power in society from those who accumulate and deploy it to those who are deprived of it.

  Publisher

• Critical Theory and Clinical Stance

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Clinicians, unlike their peers in the legal academy, are embedded in their clients’ experiences of the legal system. Because of their location in the academy, “they have the potential to transform the study of law into the study of a culture that deploys law for various purposes,” in the words of Phyllis Goldfarb. In this short essay, we highlight a thread of clinical scholarship which we identify as growing from clinicians’ unique and embedded stance. We seek to convince, using a few examples of clinical scholarship, that our collective critical stance has yielded, over the last several decades, a growing body of work that (1) is grounded in observation of lived reality and awareness of the operation of interlocking systems, (2) incorporates an innate criticality borne of the activism and advocacy of clinicians, and (3) meaningfully and productively generates and deploys theoretical insights in the wider world. Ultimately, we aim to identify a space for critical theory generation, alongside clinical scholarship that focuses on doctrinal interpretation and pedagogy and to forge room for this work in the clinic, alongside legal services provision and lawyer development.\nWhen clinicians engage in the kind of scholarship we are describing it is often subject to a few standard criticisms. The work can be seen as not rigorous. It is assumed that our duty of loyalty to clients means that we cannot write credibly and critically about cases in which we are involved. But in our embrace of the embedded nature of clinical stance, we are claiming and celebrating our proximity to clients and communities as a standpoint from which to observe and describe. We continue to think critically about degrees of bias with the understanding that all scholarly work is bent by both bias and detachment. Nevertheless, the theory that we invoke and revise from our standpoint beside clients enables us to make credible demands for social structural change. We should make those demands by all means necessary, including by seeking to alter and reform the discourse that is created by others about the communities with which we work.

  Publisher

• Access to Power

  Daedalus · 2019-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The traditional approaches to “access to justice” obscure the current distribution of economic, social, and political power, and how that distribution favors those who have power and burdens those who do not. Consequently, the traditional approaches foreclose possibilities for a truly just society. In the law clinic we led together for five years, we developed models of lawyering with our students and community partners focused on how lawyers can contribute to the redistribution of power in society from those who accumulate and deploy it to those who are deprived of it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• DACA, Government Lawyers, and the Public Interest

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security moved away from a prosecutorial-discretion model to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) to screen immigrants out of the removal pipeline. This Article adds an empirical dimension to the extant conversation on that shift. Drawing from seventeen interviews with political appointees within the executive branch during the Obama administration, as well as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this Article makes two points. First, our findings tend to confirm a “centralization” thesis. Our interview subjects — political appointees within the Obama White House and DHS — tended to confirm that DACA was intended at least in part to neutralize the influence wielded by frontline ICE officers, who tended to embrace an aggressive approach to enforcement. Second, this Article draws attention to an element of the DACA story that has thus far appeared intermittently or as an afterthought: the role of lawyers in the enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws. Our data shows that political appointees embraced competing notions of government lawyering as they attempted to find relief for immigrants through regulatory channels. In trying to provide them with relief before DACA, the executive relied on a vision of lawyering commonly associated with the prosecution of criminal laws. This contrasts with the vision of lawyering at the heart of DACA. The period preceding and leading into DACA provides a useful opportunity to advance the discussion of the ethical basis for government lawyering, particularly in light of the successive attacks within the literature on the viability of an animating conception of the “public interest.”

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen Lee

  Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center

  10 shared

• Jennifer M. Chacón

  10 shared

• Susan Bibler Coutin

  8 shared

• Rachel F. Morán

  5 shared

• Edelina M. Burciaga

  4 shared

• Alma Nidia Garza

  The University of Texas at Arlington

  4 shared

• Meena Jagannath

  3 shared

• Susan D. Carle

  Trinity College

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Inaugural recipient of the Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical…