Ezra Ross
Professor of Lawyering Skills
Expertise:
Lawyering Skills; Legal Profession
Background:
Ezra is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He helped develop the Federal Judicial Center's national legal writing program for federal judicial clerks, supervised dozens of trials through UCLA’s trial advocacy clinic, and worked with local public interest organizations to provide legal services to the Orange County homeless population. He has written about the failure of law professors to embrace pro bono work, the causes of regulatory dysfunction, and the risks of empathic lawyering.
After graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School, Ezra served as a federal judicial clerk, practiced complex commercial litigation, and was named both a Super Lawyer-Rising Star and a Lawyer of Distinction.
(Log in to view full course descriptions in the UCI Law Course Catalog)
- Learning Schematics & the Hidden Curriculum, The Unending Conversation (special issue of Stetson Law Review Forum) (forthcoming).
- Amorality in the Lawyering Skills Classroom, Vol. 73 Journal of Legal Education No. 2 (2025).
- Faculty Perspectives: The Experiential Sabbatical, Association of American Law Schools News (with Katherine Vukadin, Kathleen Burch, Bobby Harges & Martin Pritikin) (Spring 2024).
- Legal Writing and Faculty Pro Bono, 28 Legal Writing 353 (2024).
- The Fourth Element: Pro Bono for Junior Law Faculty, 2 Proceedings 37 (2022).
- Reframing Faculty Pro Bono, 70 Journal of Legal Education 3 (2022).
- Creating and Administering a Live Client Interviewing Project for 1Ls: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned from COVID-19, 29 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research & Writing 9 (2022) (with Rachel Croskery-Roberts).
- Some Pitfalls of Empathic Lawyering, 18 Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD 173 (2021).
- June 2025
Amorality & the Hidden Curriculum. Japanese Society of Sociology of Law, Regional Meeting, Tokyo, Japan - July 2024
Learning Schematics and the Hidden Curriculum. Southeastern Association of Law Schools Conference, Fort Lauderdale, Florida - June 2024
Skills Instruction and the Myth of Neutrality. Global Legal Skills Conference, Bari, Italy - January 2024
The Experiential Sabbatical: How a Semester in Practice Can Reignite Your Career and Inspire Your Students. AALS Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., (panelist) - December 2023
Ethics and the Future of Legal Writing. Legal Writing Institute, Vermont School of Law - July 2023
Storytelling and the Amoral Technician. Applied Legal Storytelling Conference, London, UK, (accepted). - July 2023
The Eclectic Collaboration. Association of Legal Writing Directors, Biennial Conference, Irvine, California, (accepted). - December 2022
Legal Writing’s Hidden Moral Curriculum. Legal Writing Institute, Seattle University School of Law, (selected as plenary talk) - Feb. 25, 2022
Featured Speaker, Creating and Administering an Interview Project for 1Ls: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned from COVID-19, Thomson Reuters Law School, Online - July 2022
Speaker, "Zero to One: Jumpstarting Faculty Pro Bono," Biennial Conference, Legal Writing Institute, Georgetown School of Law
- Faculty Roundup | May 2025
- UC Irvine Law Rings in 2025 with National Leadership Roles in Law, Policy and Academia
- UCI Law Professor Ezra Ross Elected to the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation
- Legal Writing Journal: Legal Writing and Faculty Pro Bono
- TaxProf Blog: Amorality In The Lawyering Skills Classroom
- UCI Law Leadership and Presenters at 2024 AALS Annual Meeting: “Defending Democracy”
- Paul Caron's TaxProf Blog: Legal Writing And Faculty Pro Bono
- Lawyers of Distinction: Prof. Ezra Ross was listed as a 2023 Lawyer of Distinction featured in The New York Times Sunday Edition
- Thomson Reuters Law School: Prof. Croskery-Roberts and Prof. Ross to participate in Q&A discussion on their recent publication “Creating and Administering an Interviewing Project for 1Ls: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned from COVID-19”
- Reuters Breaking Views: "U.S. Flops at Collecting Fines and Paying Them Out" (PDF), cites The Collection Gap
- New York Times: Prof. Ross speaks about The Collection Gap (PDF)
- Daily Journal: Prof. Ross' Collection Gap study discussed in op-ed
- Orlando Sentinel: Collection Gap study cited in article about Florida courts' restitution recovery rates
- The New York Times: Collection Gap study cited in article about federal failure to collect billions of dollars in fines