Sharon Dolovich

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Sharon Dolovich is a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. Her areas of scholarly interest include criminal justice policy, prisons and prison law, moral and political theory, and legal ethics. Her recent work includes “Legitimate Punishment in Liberal Democracy” (Buffalo Criminal Law Review, spring 2004), which develops the theoretical foundations for principles of legitimate punishment in liberal democracy, and “State Punishment and Private Prisons” (Duke Law Journal, forthcoming in 2005), which expands on and applies that theory to the case of private prisons.During her fellowship year, Dolovich plans to continue her work on the normative foundations of criminal justice policy through a study of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, she aims to unearth the principles that guide the various aspects of the legal doctrine in this area to determine whether there are resources within the Constitution with which to challenge current directions in American criminal justice policy.

Dolovich received a PhD in political theory from Cambridge University in 1994 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1998. Last year, she was selected by the Cornell University Program on Ethics and Public Life as a Young Scholar for 2004–2005. Her piece “Legitimate Punishment in Liberal Democracy” was chosen by the 2004 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum as one of the best submitted articles in both criminal law and jurisprudence and philosophy—the first article ever to be selected in two categories.