19 Facts About Lara Bazelon

Lara Bazelon was born on February 14,1974 and is an American academic and journalist.

Lara Bazelon is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles.

Lara Bazelon's writing about the criminal justice system and critiques of its most prominent players has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Slate, and Politico Magazine.

Lara Bazelon's father is an attorney and her mother is a psychiatrist.

Lara Bazelon attended Germantown Friends School, where she was on the tennis team.

Lara Bazelon has three sisters: Emily Bazelon, an award-winning New York Times journalist and author; Jill Bazelon, who founded an organization that provides financial literacy classes free of charge to low income high school students and individuals; and Dana Bazelon, senior policy counsel to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

Lara Bazelon's note, Exploding the Superpredator Myth, won the Paul D Kaufman Memorial Award and was cited by Bryan Stevenson in his Supreme Court brief in Sullivan v Florida, where he successfully argued that the Eighth Amendment forbade the sentencing of juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed before the age of 13.

In 2017, Lara Bazelon joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco School of Law as an associate professor and the director of the Criminal and Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics.

Joaquin Ciria was freed after the San Francisco District Attorney's Innocence Commission, chaired by Lara Bazelon, reinvestigated Ciria's case and recommended that the District Attorney seek to overturn his conviction.

In 2018, Lara Bazelon began filing bar complaints against prosecutors whom judges had found to have committed misconduct.

Lara Bazelon's scholarship examining issues at the intersection of criminal justice and ethics as well as restorative justice as an alternative to incarceration, has been published in The Fordham Law Review, the Hofstra Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Lara Bazelon is quoted frequently in national and local media as an expert on criminal justice issues.

Lara Bazelon serves as a voting member of the ABA Criminal Justice Section's Council, the policymaking body for the organization on criminal justice issues.

Lara Bazelon has written for The Atlantic about the gender bias female trial lawyers face and how the felony murder rule disproportionately impacts women and people of color.

Lara Bazelon's long running series on wrongful convictions has appeared in Slate since 2015 and her Innocence Deniers article was Slate's cover story in 2018.

Lara Bazelon's book, Ambitious Like A Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids, published in 2022, is an expansion on that thesis.

Lara Bazelon was an early supporter of Chesa Boudin's campaign to become San Francisco District Attorney in 2019, and served as a member of his policy team.

In 2020, Lara Bazelon was elected to the American Law Institute.

In 2017, Lara Bazelon was a Langeloth Fellow and Mesa Fellow writer in residence.