Alexandra Natapoff
Co-Director, Center in Law, Society and Culture and Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine
Alexandra’s scholarship has won numerous awards, including a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2013 Law and Society Association Article Prize, and two Outstanding Scholarship Awards from the Association of American Law Schools Criminal Justice Section. Her new book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, describes the powerful influence that misdemeanors exert over the entire US criminal system. It was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2018.
Alexandra is also author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice which won the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for Books; her original work on criminal informants has made her a nationally-recognized expert. Alexandra is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI); in 2015 she was appointed as an Adviser to the ALI Policing Project. She has helped draft legislation at both the state and federal levels and is quoted frequently by major media outlets.
Prior to joining the academy, Alexandra served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland, and was the recipient of an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship.
Alexandra participated in the second Square One Roundtable convening “Examining Criminalization, Punitive Excess, and the Courts in the United States: Implications for Justice Policy and Practice.”