Gabriel “Jack” Chin is Edward L. Barrett Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. Regularly listed as one of the most cited legal scholars, he writes about APA Legal History and criminal law. His work with students includes persuading Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming to repeal anti-Asian alien land laws which were still on the books; the Ohio legislature to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 2003; and the California Supreme Court to posthumously admit an Asian-American attorney to the bar after he was excluded because of his race in 1890 (In re Chang, 334 P.3d 288 (Cal. 2015)). His Cornell Law Review article, “Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas”, was cited in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), and Chaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103 (2013). Justice Sotomayor cited his University of Pennsylvania Law Review article “The New Civil Death” in her dissent in Utah v. Streiff, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016).
Before entering teaching he graduated from Wesleyan and the Michigan and Yale law schools, clerked for U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in Denver, and practiced with the Legal Aid Society of New York.
Jack is a Speaker for the Moving Forward After Trump v. Barbara: Constitutional Principles, Immigration Policy, and the American Promise and Race and Space: How Laws Create and Impact Asian Spaces programs.