Position Title
Professor of Law
- [email protected]
- Curriculum Vitae
- Google Scholar Link
- Legal Scholarship at SSRN
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Eric Fish joined the faculty at UC Davis School of Law in 2021. He writes about criminal law, immigration law, and constitutional law, with a particular focus on the prosecution of immigrants. At King Hall, he teaches Criminal Law and Professional Ethics. Fish’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Texas Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and Emory Law Journal, among others.
Before entering law teaching Fish spent four years as a public defender, working at the Federal Defenders of San Diego and at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. He received his J.D. and Ph.D. in Law from Yale, where he served as an Articles Editor on the Yale Law Journal, and received the Joseph A. Chubb Prize for the best legal draftsmanship by a student, the Judge William E. Miller Prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights, and the Mary A. McCarthy Fellowship for public interest work. After law school he clerked for Judges Pierre Leval and Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
- Criminal Law and Procedure
- Constitutional Law
- Sentencing
- Immigration Law And Policy
- Ethics
Publications
"The Bench Trial System," (with Elana Fogel and Jesse Lopez) (in progress).
"Entry Discrimination and the Undocumented Immigrant Class System" (in progress).
"Deportation in the Deep State," Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2027) (selected for the 2026 University of Chicago Constitutional Law Conference).
"Transforming Immigration Law by Ignoring It," University of Chicago Law Review Online (forthcoming 2026).
"Fabricating the Crime of Undocumented Presence," Fordham Law Review (with Doug Keller) (forthcoming 2026).
"Reverse-Engineering Reversals," Journal of Advocacy and Litigation (with Jack Chin and David Porter) (forthcoming 2026).
"Sentencing Immigrants," 99 Southern California Law Review 291 (2025) (presented by invitation to the Ninth Circuit Opportunity & Equality Committee).
"Standardization and Routine in Criminal Justice," 78 Vanderbilt Law Review 1721 (2025).
"Defense Lawyers and the Separation of Powers," 60 Wake Forest Law Review 509 (2025) (with Chesa Boudin).
"The Saddest Cases," Immigration and Nationality Law Review (2024) (symposium remarks).
"Towards Pretrial Criminal Adjudication," 66 Boston College Law Review 1135 (2024) (with Chesa Boudin).
"Resisting Mass Immigrant Prosecutions," 133 Yale Law Journal 1884 (2024).
"The Constitutional Limits of Criminal Supervision," 108 Cornell Law Review 1375 (2023) (selected for the 2023 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum).
"Race, History, and Immigration Crimes," 107 Iowa Law Review 1051 (2022).
"The Paradox of Criminal History," 42 Cardozo Law Review 1373 (2021).
"Against Adversary Prosecution," 103 Iowa Law Review 1419 (2018) (awarded the Fred C. Zacharias Prize, the section prize for Professional Responsibility at the 2019 Association of American Law Schools Conference).
"Prosecutorial Constitutionalism," 90 Southern California Law Review 237 (2017).
"Federalism and Moral Disagreement," 101 Minnesota Law Review 1 (2017) (with Guido Calabresi).
"Choosing Constitutional Remedies," 63 UCLA Law Review 322 (2016) (reprinted in Spanish by the Journal of the Center of Constitutional Studies, Supreme Court of Mexico).
"Constitutional Avoidance as Interpretation and as Remedy," 114 Michigan Law Review 1275 (2016).
"Judicial Amendment of Statutes," 84 George Washington Law Review 563 (2016).
"Sentencing and Interbranch Dialogue," 105 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 549 (2015).
"Severability as Conditionality," 64 Emory Law Journal 1293 (2015).
"Originalism, Sex Discrimination, and Age Discrimination," 91 Texas Law Review See Also 1 (2012)
"The Twenty-Sixth Amendment Enforcement Power," 121 Yale Law Journal 1168 (2012).