Julia Mendoza is an interdisciplinary legal scholar who uses ethnography, historical archival methods, and oral histories to produce community-based legal scholarship that examines racialized harm and to understand how the law fails to atone for racial disparities. Her primary goal as a scholar is to produce research that is helpful for communities experiencing various forms of organized abandonment and disenfranchisement.
Her article “Healing the Land: Considering Collective Reparations“ was published in April 2026 in UC Davis Law Review (2026) and “Resistance Rights” is forthcoming in Minnesota Law Review (2027). She also recently published “The Language of Mass Incarceration and Organized Abandonment” in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties. She is currently conducting research for two projects that focus on community organizers resisting the recent immigration raids by providing collective care for people in immigrant detention, and police violence in unincorporated areas such as East L.A.
Previous publications include “On Top of Prison Row: A Topographical History of Carcerality in California” (UCLA Law Review), and “Writing for Abolitionist Futures“ (Stanford Law Review).
At Loyola, Mendoza teaches “Criminal Law,” “Critical Race Theory,” and a seminar on “Police and Prison Abolition.” Previously, Professor Mendoza was a fellow at Stanford Law School and served as a legal fellow at the ACLU of Northern California in the Racial Justice Project. During her fellowship, she worked on two advocacy campaigns that utilized a combination of legislative advocacy, public education, and organizing strategies to address racial disparities within public schools and felon disenfranchisement.
In addition to her appointment at Loyola, Mendoza is a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School, where she teaches legal research and writing and transnational federal litigation. She holds master’s degrees in human rights and American studies from Columbia University and NYU, respectively, and a Ph.D. in American studies from NYU. She earned her J.D. from UC Davis School of Law.