Professor Thalia González Joins UC Law SF Faculty

Thalia González

Professor Thalia González

González joins Hastings after working at Georgetown University Law Center as a Senior Scholar in the Center on Poverty and Inequality and as the Madeline N. McKinnie Professor of Politics at Occidental College. She is an expert in restorative and transformative justice, including how restorative justice practices, applications, and theories operate within the law and public systems to remedy structural inequality and address individual and systemic harm.

At Hastings, González will teach Criminal Law; Race, Racism and American law; and courses on restorative justice and health justice. “It is truly a privilege to teach a new generation of leaders who will seek to promote justice not only in our local ​legal systems, but across through the country as well as internationally.” She also has been a visiting scholar and professor at Denver University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley’s law schools.

González talked about what drew her to Hastings, “It has an incredible interdisciplinary faculty working across existing and emerging legal domains.” She added, “as an urban campus in San Francisco, students and faculty alike understand that they not simply studying pressing legal issues but engaging in action for the public good.”

As a researcher committed to collaborative partnerships, González focuses on developing new empirical evidence of race and gender disparities grounded in the lived experience of impacted people and communities. She is a co-author of a study on the adultification of Black girls and is developing adultification bias training for judges and judicial staff, particularly for family and juvenile court judges. González already has started planning a conference on restorative justice to be held in the spring of 2023, co-hosted with the National Center on Restorative Justice, and will partner with two Hastings journals – the Journal on Gender and the Law and the Race and Poverty Law Journal. She earned her JD from the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and BA Arizona State University.