Sameer Ashar

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Deferred action and the discretionary state: migration, precarity and resistance

  Citizenship Studies · 2017-09-20 · 38 citations

  article

  In the United States, the lives of undocumented people have become increasingly precarious due to increased surveillance, enforcement, criminalization, and detention. In this context, deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion in which the government declines to pursue removal and provides temporary work authorization, has become a source of both hope and vulnerability. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and legal analysis, we delineate the forms of partial inclusion experienced by deferre…

  PublisherDOI

• 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…

  Publisher

• Deep Critique and Democratic Lawyering in Clinical Practice

  California Law Review · 2016-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The crisis in legal education has been defined and accentuated by urgent and existential critiques. This body of complaint and suggestion—in the form of books, foundation reports, law review articles, major media entries, and blog posts—has two gaping holes that this Essay seeks to fill. First, the critiques fail to attend to the diminishing of social justice values and commitments in legal education in the period leading up to the 2008 recession, especially as clinical education—often designate…

  PublisherDOI

• Navigating Liminal Legalities Along Pathways To Citizenship: Immigrant Vulnerability and the Role of Mediating Institutions

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2016-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this report, we summarize the findings of research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and conducted in Southern California over the course of eighteen months between January 2014 and September 2015. This time period coincided with the announcement of and subsequent legal challenges to the DACA and DAPA program – a period characterized by extreme legal uncertainty over the availability and scope of these “Executive Relief” programs. Drawing from 16 in-depth interviews with staff of 10 diffe…

  PublisherOA PDF

• 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 soci…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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…

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