Sameer Ashar

Expertise:

Law and Social Movements; Law and Political Economy; Law and Abolition; Public Interest Law; Clinical Legal Education

Background:

Sameer Ashar is Clinical Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Workers and Tenants Law and Organizing Clinic at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Ashar has developed scholarly method through collaborations with social movement formations, law students, and co-counsel in legal practice and in exchange with interdisciplinary groups of thinkers. He is focused on interactions between law and social movements, political economy, and abolitionist thought, specifically the ways in which law both structures and inhibits emancipatory change.

Ashar has published in Yale Law Journal Forum, Stanford Law Review, Daedalus, Law & Contemporary Problems, Fordham Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and California Law Review, amongst other journals. He is co-author of two chapters in Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law (Stanford University Press 2024), which interprets qualitative data in Southern California on immigrant agency during a period of federal policy paralysis. The collaborative research was supported by grants from the Russell Sage and National Science Foundations.

Ashar served as a Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto Faculty of Law and scholar-in-residence at King’s College Dickson Poon School of Law, both in 2025. He was scholar-in-residence at University of Denver School of Law and Howard and Phyllis Friedman Inclusive Economy Fellow at the Mesa Refuge in 2022. He was the inaugural recipient of the Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award, given by the AALS Section on Clinical Education in 2020, and a longtime member of the Board of Editors of Clinical Law Review. Ashar was a trustee of the Law and Society Association from 2008 to 2011.

Ashar has worked with students and community organizers in defense of immigrant workers in California, New York, and Maryland. He has supported numerous immigrant and labor organizations on litigation, policy advocacy, and community education projects, including UNITE-HERE Local 11, Rideshare Drivers United, Warehouse Workers Resource Center, and California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. Ashar founded the Immigrant Rights and Workers and Tenants Law and Organizing Clinics at UC Irvine, revamped the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic at City University of New York, and co-founded the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Maryland.

Ashar has been on the UC Irvine faculty since 2011, other than service as Vice Dean for Experiential Education and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law from 2018 to 2020. He is a former Associate Dean for Equity at UC Irvine and co-initiator of the Race and Indigeneity Graduation Requirement adopted by the faculty in 2021. Ashar is a founding faculty member of the UC Irvine Labor Center. He is a member of the boards of Grassroots Law and Organizing for Workers and Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice and a co-founder of the Orange County Justice Fund. Ashar is a former member of the boards of Swarthmore College and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a former Chair of the AALS Section on Poverty Law.

Prior to UC Irvine Law, Ashar was Associate Dean for Clinical Programs and Associate Professor of Law at City University of New York School of Law, where he also directed the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic. He started his legal academic career as an ILGWU Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor with the NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic. Before entering the academy, Ashar clerked for Judge Deborah A. Batts in the Southern District of New York and served as Skadden Fellow with a focus on community economic development at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he co-founded Legal Services for Entrepreneurs.

At Harvard Law School, Ashar was an Irving Kaufman Public Service Fellow and Lead Articles Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He graduated from Swarthmore College with High Honors in Political Science, Economics, and Religion and was a recipient of the Ivy Award for Leadership, Scholarship, and Contributions to the Community.

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