Professor Ascanio Piomelli attended Stanford University, A.B. History (1982), and Stanford Law School, J.D. (1985). Before joining UC Hastings in 1992 to help launch the Civil Justice Clinic, Professor Piomelli worked as a legal services attorney in Fresno, California, where he litigated on behalf of low-income workers and tenants. He also served as an attorney and later executive director of the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, then Stanford Law School’s primary clinical outplacement. There he worked to enforce the city’s rent stabilization law, improve housing conditions, and facilitate citizen participation in local land-use decisions—as part of community efforts to resist gentrification and residential displacement.

The faculty advisor of the Social Justice Lawyering Concentration, his academic writing centers on efforts by attorneys and other activists to create progressive social change. He explores the models of lawyering and social change informing such work, the relationships between lawyers, clients, and communities, and the impact of race, class, and gender on those efforts. He is proponent and analyst of a “collaborative,” “rebellious,” or what he and others now label a “democratic” approach to social-change lawyering—in which lawyers work with, rather than on behalf of, clients and communities to collectively press for social change. His recent work has explored the participatory democratic vision and values that underlie such efforts.

Ascanio Piomelli, FOUCAULT’S APPROACH TO POWER: ITS ALLURE AND LIMITS FOR COLLABORATIVE LAWYERING, 2004 Utah L. Rev. 395 (2004)

Ascanio Piomelli, THE DEMOCRATIC ROOTS OF COLLABORATIVE LAWYERING, 12 Clinical L. Rev. 541 (2006)

Ascanio Piomelli, THE CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRATIC LAWYERING, 77 Fordham L. Rev. 1383 (2009)

Ascanio Piomelli, SENSIBILITIES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE LAWYERS, 10 Hastings Race & Poverty L. J. 177 (2013)

Ascanio Piomelli, CROSS-CULTURAL LAWYERING BY THE BOOK: THE LATEST CLINICAL TEXTS AND A SKETCH OF A FUTURE AGENDA, 4 Hastings Race & Poverty L. J. 131 (2006)