Mario Barnes

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…

Research topics

• Political Science

Selected publications

• Empirical Methods and Critical Race Theory: A Discourse on Possibilities for a Hybrid Methodology

  2016-01-01 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of Obama in Anti-Discrimination Law

  2012-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Labor and Employment Law Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change? Symposium held November 12-13, 2010, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana.

  Publisher

• "The More Things Change . . .": New Moves for Legitimizing Racial Discrimination in a "Post-Race" World

  Minnesota law review · 2016-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In his foundational Minnesota Law Review article, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholar Alan D. Freeman reviewed 25 years of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence with the goal of analyzing the disjuncture between the statutory and constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination and the continuing subordination of racial minorities, achieved partially through law’s complicity. His analys…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Judging Opportunity Lost: Assessing the Viability of Race-Based Affirmative Action after Fisher v. University of Texas

  2015-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this Article, Mario Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig examine and analyze one recent, affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin, as a means of highlighting why the anti-subordination or equal opportunity approach, as opposed to the anti-classification approach, is the correct approach for analyzing equal protection cases. In so doing, these authors highlight several opportunities that the U.S. Supreme Court missed to acknowledge and explicate the way i…

  Publisher

• 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 com…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Courtney Cahillh-56
• Robert S. Changh-34
• Andrew Goldh-25