Gabriel Jackson Chin

Biography

Gabriel “Jack” Chin is a teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law. His scholarship has appeared in the Penn, UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties law reviews and the Yale, Duke and Georgetown law journals among others. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on collateral consequences of criminal conviction in Chaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103, 1109 (2013), in which the Court called his Cornell Law Review article “the principal scholarly article on the subject” and in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), which agreed with his contention that the Sixth Amendment required defense counsel to advise clients about potential deportation consequences of guilty pleas. Justice Sotomayor cited his Penn Law Review article in her dissent in Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2070 (2016).

He teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Immigration, and is Director of Clinical Legal Education. He also works with students on professional projects. His efforts with students to repeal Jim Crow laws still on the books includes a successful 2003 petition to the Ohio legislature to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, 136 years after the state disapproved it during the ratification process. He and his students also achieved the repeal of anti-Asian alien land laws which were on the books in Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. For this work, A Magazine named him one of the “25 Most Notable Asians in America.” In connection with classes with a practical component, he has tried felony cases and argued criminal appeals with his students.

Professor Chin earned a B.A. at Wesleyan, a J.D. from Michigan and an LL.M. from Yale. He clerked for U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in Denver and practiced with Skadden and The Legal Aid Society of New York. He taught at the Arizona, Cincinnati, NYU and Western New England law schools before joining the UC Davis faculty. His professional activities include service as Reporter on the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act, approved in 2009 by the Uniform Law Commission, and for the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice: Collateral Sanctions and Discretionary Disqualification of Convicted Persons (3d ed. 2003). Chin is a founding board member of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center and a member of the American Law Institute.

Articles, Publications, and Appearances

In the News

• UC Davis news, Bee quote Professor Chin about legality of hoarding during a crisis

• Associated Press quotes Professor Chin in story about former Phoenix-area Sheriff Joe Arpaio

• History channel seeks Professor Chin’s insights on Immigration Act of 1965

• ‘America’s Test Kitchen’ podcast highlights article by Professor Chin, John Ormonde ’15

• Associated Press quotes Professor Chin about controversial Arizona immigration incident

• Associated Press interviews Professor Chin about Rhode Island’s ‘civil death’ law

• Daily Beast interviews Professor Chin for story on celebrity lawyer Avenatti

• New York Times story on Chinese restaurants cites Professor Chin’s scholarship