Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Presidential Assistant Professor of Law
Shaun Ossei-Owusu is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. His work sits at the intersection of law, history, and sociology, and focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide services and benefits to poor people and racial minorities.
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Shaun Ossei-Owusu is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. His work sits at the intersection of law, history, and sociology, and focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide services and benefits to poor people and racial minorities. He also works on stratification in legal education and the legal profession.
He has received awards from social science and humanities organizations such as the American Bar Foundation, American Society for Criminology, American Society for Legal History, The Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and the American Journal of Law & Medicine, among other outlets. His public writing has appeared in the American Prospect, Boston Review, Jacobin, Public Books, and Salon.
His book project, The People's Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Before joining the Penn Law faculty, he was an Academic Fellow and a Kellis E. Parker Teaching Fellow at Columbia Law School. He received his PhD from the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and his JD from Berkeley Law. He previously practiced litigation and healthcare enforcement law at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C., and worked as a Loaned Associate focusing on public benefits appeals with the Barbara McDowell Appellate Advocacy Project at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. He is a proud Bronx-born native.
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Articles and Book Chapters
Police Quotas, 96 NYU L. Rev. __ (2021).
Velvet Rope Discrimination, 107 VA. L. REV. __ (2021).
The Welfarist Right to Counsel, 68 UCLA L. REV. __ (2021).
Racial Revisionism, 119 MICH. L. REV. __ (2020).
Civil vs. Criminal Legal Aid, 95 S. CAL. L. REV. __(2020).
The Sixth Amendment Façade: The Racial Evolution of the Right to Counsel, 167 U. PA. L. REV. 1161 (2019).
Code Red: The Essential Yet Neglected Role of Emergency Care in Health Law Reform, 43 AM. J. L. & MED. 344 (2017).
The State Giveth and Taketh Away: Race, Class and Urban Hospital Closings, 92 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1037 (2017).
Racial Horizons and Empirical Landscapes in the Post-ACA World, 2016 WIS. L. REV. 493 (2016).
More publications can be found here.
Working Papers
The New Penal Bureaucrats (forthcoming)
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The Racial Reckoning of Public Interest Law (forthcoming with Atinuke Adediran)
Leisure Justice (forthcoming)
Research Areas
- Criminal Law and Procedure
- Legal History
- Law and Society
- Civil Rights
- Race, Class, Gender and the Law
- Legal Profession
- Social Welfare Law
Courses
- Criminal Law
- The Legal Profession
- Law and Inequality
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