Expertise
Critical Race Theory, Law and Literature, Law and the Visual and Performing Arts, Law of Sexual Assault, Property Law
Biography
After law school, Yxta Murray clerked for the Honorable Harry Hupp in the Central District of California and then for the Honorable Ferdinand Fernandez of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena. She joined the Loyola Law School faculty in 1995.
In 2018, Professor Murray received an Art Writer’s Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation in connection with Creative Capital. The author of nine books, her latest are Advice and Consent (LARB Books 2019), The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press 2020), and Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly 2021). The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, which addresses the on-the-ground impacts of administrative law rollbacks on people of color, was named a best book of 2020 by Buzzfeed. A 1999 Whiting Writer’s Award winner, Murray was also named a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in Fiction in 2019 and will publish in The Best American Short Stories 2021. She has won residencies at MacDowell, UCross, Mesa Refuge, and Willipa Bay AIR. In 2022, she will be a short-term fellow at the Huntington Library and a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her art criticism, journalism, and short fiction appears in Artillery Magazine, Aperture, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Santa Monica Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Joyland, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and other magazines.
Publications, Research and Related Material
Courses Taught
- Criminal Law
- Property Law (as of Fall 2019)
- Women and the Law
- Law and Literature
- Sentencing
- Sexual Orientation and the Law
Links
Education
- BA, UCLA, English, 1989, cum laude
- J.D., Stanford Law School, 1993, cum laude
Scholarship and Related Projects
Professor Murray writes about Community Constitutionalism, Criminal Law, Property Law, Gender Justice, and Law and Literature. She also writes about the relationship between law and visual, conceptual, and performance art. She has published law review articles in the California Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, The Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, and N.Y.U Journal of Law & Social Change. Her most recent scholarship concerns anti-Asian violence, rape law, and the work of Yoko Ono, and will appear in Law and Literature.
Her work in community legal thought also found expression in an art show titled Drawn Together, which launched in 2020 at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side. Her co-artists in this project, which studies power inequities in artists’ contracts, are Mira Dayal, Simon Wu, Maia Chao, and Anais Duplan.
Contact
Burns 308
919 Albany St.
Los Angeles, CA 90015
(o) 213.736.8169
(f) 213.380.3769
