About

Mario Barnes is a Chancellor's Professor of Law and the Director of the Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEaR) at UC Irvine Law. He returned to UC Irvine Law in spring 2022 after serving as the Toni Rembe Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law from 2018 to 2021. Prof. Barnes is a nationally recognized scholar known for his research on the legal and social implications of race and gender, with a primary focus on employment, education, criminal, and military law. He is a leader and organizer within the academic community, seeking to strengthen connections between empirical studies and Critical Race Theory. His teaching and scholarship encompass criminal law, constitutional law, national security law, and race and the law. At UC Irvine Law, he played a key role in developing the curriculum and fostering a sense of community, and he has held several administrative positions including senior associate dean for academic affairs and faculty development and research. His prior academic appointments include the University of Miami School of Law and the University of Wisconsin School of Law. Before his academic career, Prof. Barnes served 12 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy, including roles as a prosecutor, defense counsel, special assistant U.S. attorney, and a member of the commission investigating the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. His reserve service included assignments with the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, the Navy Inspector General's Office, and U.S. Special Operations Command, retiring in 2013 after 23 years of combined active and reserve service. He holds a bachelor's degree and a J.D. from UC Berkeley and an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin. Prof. Barnes is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice. His awards include the AALS Ferguson Award and the Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award.

Research topics

• Political Science

Selected publications

• On The “Storied” History and Sustained Impact of a Thriving Social Justice Journal

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2026-04-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Introduction to the special issue on empirical methods and critical race theory

  Law & Society Review · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be understood as an attempt to examine how race and racism are central rather than peripheral to law and legal thinking. Rather than viewing the long and ongoing story of race in American law as a series of unfortunate aberrations to an otherwise fair and impartial legal system, CRT sees racial subordination and the marginalization of other disempowered groups as foundational to how law and democracy are organized and function in society. With this intervention comes other commitments such as rejecting law’s presumed neutrality; a dissatisfaction with traditional Civil Rights approaches to racial equality; understanding how identity traits such as race and sex intersect and constitute one another; and taking the inherently political nature of legal scholarship seriously (Crenshaw et al. 1995). This framework has been both widely celebrated and consistently attacked since its emergence in the 1980s by people both inside and outside the academy (Rosen 1996). In many ways, CRT is the proverbial millennial that seems forever young but, in reality, is now middle aged.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2024

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  DOI

• 2021: Critical Race Theory and the Law

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01

  article

  The Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture, named in honor of former Dean Richard J. Childress (1969-1976), is a premier academic event highlighting a provocative and timely area of law. The lecture commemorates the contributions Dean Childress made academically, ethically, and socially to benefit the Saint Louis University School of Law.\nDean Childress was a member of the faculty at the School of Law for almost 30 years, and then served for 15 years as associate dean and dean. Among other achievements, Dean Childress is credited with founding the Saint Louis University Law Journal.\nEvery year, the Journal sponsors the Lecture and publishes the keynote address on a timely legal topic as well as responses from the lecture’s scholarly participants.\nEstablished by the generosity of alumni and friends of the former dean, the lecture aims to enhance the exemplary teaching at the School of Law by bringing world-renowned scholars to campus for academic enrichment.\nThis year's annual Childress Lecture, in cooperation with the Saint Louis University Department of African American Studies, will examine critical race theory, which seeks to critically examine American law as it intersects with issues of race and other social constructs in the United States.

  Publisher

• We Will Turn Back?: On Why Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Makes a Case for Adopting More Radically Race-Conscious Admissions Policies

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Evaluation of Murri Court: Prepared for the Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney-General

  Figshare · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

• <i>The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice</i> . By Ellen Berrey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

  Law & Society Review · 2018-05-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Can Brown Do for You? Addressing McCleskey v. Kemp as a Flawed Standard for Measuring the Constitutionally Significant Risk of Race Bias

  Northwestern University law review · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This Essay asserts that in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court created a problematic standard for the evidence of race bias necessary to uphold an equal protection claim under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. First, the Court’s opinion reinforced the cramped understanding that constitutional claims require evidence of not only disparate impact but also discriminatory purpose, producing significant negative consequences for the operation of the U.S. criminal justice system. Second, the Court rejected the Baldus study’s findings of statistically significant correlations between the races of the perpetrators and victims and the imposition of the death penalty within Georgia criminal courts as insufficient proof of discriminatory intent, overlooking unconscious and structural racism. Third, Justice Lewis Powell’s approach to causation in McCleskey would have rendered almost any social science study incapable of proving the existence of race bias to his satisfaction, creating an unduly high bar for proving intent.\nFurthermore, this Essay contrasts the Court’s use of the Baldus data in McCleskey with its use of social science data in other cases. For example, in oral arguments for a recent gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford, Chief Justice John Roberts summarily rejected the utility of applying empirical findings. In Brown v. Board of Education, by contrast, the Court positively endorsed studies on the harms of racial segregation that were less robust than the Baldus data. In response to uneven uses of empirical data in these cases, this Essay suggests approaches courts might develop to distinguish between stronger and weaker empirical evidence, including an update of how appellate courts review research introduced under the Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. standard. In the wake of decisions such as McCleskey, and the troubled history of considerations of race within social science research, this Essay also articulates the unique challenges that must be confronted when courts consider data on racial impact.

  Publisher

• Un-“Civilized”: On the Criminalization of Raced and Gendered Poverty through Child Support Enforcement

  Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like · 2016-04-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Afterword: Everything Old

  UC Irvine law review · 2016-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Erwin Chemerinsky

  University of California Hastings College of the Law

  92 shared

• Jason Palmer

  American Studies Association

  81 shared

• Devon W. Carbado

  University of Pittsburgh

  81 shared

• Alma Garza

  Tulane University

  81 shared

• Hiroshi Motomura

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  81 shared

• Jayashri Srikantiah

  Tulane University

  81 shared

• Joel Sati

  Humboldt State University

  81 shared

• Richard A. Boswell

  University of Hawaii System

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• AALS Ferguson Award (2015)
• AALS Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award (2008)
• American Bar Foundation Fellows
• Distinguished Fellow of the National Institute of Military J…
• Fellow of the American Bar Foundation