Vroman’s welcomes the ACLU SoCal, who has assembled a panel to discuss Joanna Schwartz’s book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable – an urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country’s leading scholars on policing.

This conversation will be moderated by LA Review of Books Editor, Michelle Chihara, and panelists include author Joanna Schwartz, ACLU of Southern California’s Executive Director, Hector Villagra and one more speaker TBA.

Joanna Schwartz is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. She received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015, and served as Vice Dean for Faculty Development from 2017-2019.

Professor Schwartz is one of the country’s leading experts on police misconduct litigation and the author of Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (2023). Her recent scholarship—published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and elsewhere—includes articles empirically examining the justifications for qualified immunity doctrine; the financial impact of settlements and judgments on federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and agency budgets; and regional variation in civil rights protections across the country. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Boston Review, and Politico, and has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS Sunday Morning, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, and elsewhere. Professor Schwartz additionally studies the dynamics of modern civil litigation and is the co-author, with Stephen Yeazell and Maureen Carroll, of a leading casebook, Civil Procedure (11th Edition).

Professor Schwartz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School. After law school, Professor Schwartz clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York and Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was then associated with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP, in New York City, where she specialized in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, and First Amendment litigation.

Hector Villagra has been the Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California since 2011 and has overseen the opening of additional offices in Kern and San Bernardino counties.

He has led numerous civil rights cases involving such issues as educational equity, religious discrimination, immigrants’ rights and voting rights.

Hector has received the Daniel Levy Award for outstanding achievement in immigration law from the National Lawyer’s Guild and in 2012, he received the Attorney of the Year Award from the Hispanic Bar Association of Orange County.

Hector graduated from Columbia University and Columbia University School of Law.

Michelle Chihara is Editor-in-Chief of LARB.  Previously, she was Associate Dean and Director of the Whittier Scholars Program, and Associate Professor of English at Whittier College, where she  taught contemporary American literature, media studies, and creative writing for nine years. Recent peer-reviewed publications include Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory, American Literary History, Postmodern Culture, and a chapter in New Directions in Print Culture Studies from Bloomsbury Press. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics (2018). Other essays have appeared in Post45: Contemporaries, Politics/Letters and Avidly.org. Since 2017, she has been the section editor for Econ & Finance at The Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is also a frequent contributor.

Before getting her doctorate at in English Literature, she received her MFA in Fiction, both at UC Irvine, and before that, she was a reporter, editor and freelancer. She worked as a staff writer at two weekly newspapers, The New Haven Advocate and The Boston Phoenix and as an online editor at the investigative news magazine Mother Jones.  Her reporting and prose have appeared in news outlets like The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle and Mother Jones, as well as magazines like n+1, Nerve.com, Bloomberg.com.  Her essays have been anthologized and her essay from Rare Bird Press’s volume, Slouching Towards Los Angeles was featured on LitHub and on European television; she has published fiction, nonfiction, reportage and essays in a variety of publications, online and off. She once quit her job, sold everything she owned, and moved to Rio de Janeiro to live by the beach and practice capoeira for a year.

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