Professor

Ann

Southworth

Ann Southworth is Professor of Law and Raymond Pryke Chair at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches and writes on the legal profession, legal ethics, cause lawyers, legal mobilization, law and social movements, and First Amendment law. She also serves as co-director of UC Irvine Law School’s Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession. She is the author of Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (U. Chicago Press, 2008) and Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (U. Chicago Press, 2023) (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2024 and a 2025 Order of the Coif Book Award Finalist). She has also co-authored two textbooks: The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice, now in its 3rd edition, and What Lawyers Do:Understanding the Many American Legal Practices (2020). Her articles on civil rights and poverty lawyers, lawyers active in national policymaking, the conservative legal movement, transnational conservative lawyer networks, and the influence of legal advocacy organizations on constitutional doctrine, have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. 

She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University. She clerked for Judge Stanley Weigel (N.D. Cal.) and practiced at Morrison & Foerster, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the U.S. Department of Justice (Civil Appellate). Before joining the UC Irvine School of Law as a member of the founding faculty, she was a professor at Case Western Reserve, an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation, a visiting professor at UCLA Law School, and the Covington & Burling Distinguished Visitor at Harvard Law School, where she remains an affiliated scholar. During the 2026-2027 academic year, she will be a Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.