Photo: Marc-Tizoc González

Marc-Tizoc  González

Professor of Law

Education

  • B.A., University of California, Davis
  • M.A., San Francisco State University
  • J.D., University of California, Berkeley

Contact Information

 Ph.: 505-277-8662
 Office: 3411
 
  Website

Profile

Professor Marc-Tizoc González joined the UNM School of Law faculty in July 2019 after teaching at the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida from 2011 to 2019. He teaches Property I and II, Wills and Trusts, Ethics, Intellectual Property Law, and a new seminar—Latinas, Latinos, and the Law.

Professor González is a co-author of Richard Delgado et al., Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials (West Academic 2d ed. 2021) and serves on the board of directors and steering committee of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc. (LatCrit)—an organization of socially-active law professors, and other lawyers and academics (predominantly based in the United States), who advance a critical, emancipatory, and inter-disciplinary discourse of multidimensional justice within and between Latina/o/x communities and other racialized peoples.

He chairs the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Civil Rights, serves as immediate past chair of the AALS Section on Minority Groups, and is a longtime member of the AALS Section on Poverty Law’s executive committee.

In 2021, Professor González was appointed to the New Mexico State Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He also serves on the alumni advisory board of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (for which he previously served as editor-in-chief) and an occasional outside reviewer for the Pacific Historical Review. When time permits, he affiliates with the Academy of Food Law & Policy; Association of Law, Property and Society; ClassCrits network for critical analysis of law and economic inequality; Law and Society Association; Society of American Law Teachers; and nascent Critical (Legal) Collective.

Professor González has authored or co-authored persuasive amicus curiae briefs for the United States Courts of Appeal for the Ninth and Eleventh Circuits and endorsed numerous amicus briefs for other courts. He occasionally submits expert declarations for federal or state court matters challenging employment discrimination against Latinos, or supporting their claims for asylum, and he has taught continuing legal education workshops on race-conscious affirmative action, social diversity in higher education, and the elimination of bias in the legal profession.

Most recently, with colleagues and students at the UNM School of Law, Professor González coauthored an amicus brief for the New Mexico Court of Appeals regarding the public accommodation provision of the New Mexico Human Rights Act, in support of a Native American plaintiff-appellant, who was subjected to invidious anti-Indigenous discrimination by her public high school AP English teacher.

Scholarship

Professor González critiques and theorizes how constitutional jurisprudence, civil rights statutes, and property law affect people who are hungry, impoverished, or otherwise socially marginalized—and argues for judicial interpretations and legislative enactments that will protect people’s efforts to share food, cultivate interracial justice, and otherwise manifest solidarity. He also researches and represents how lawyers, especially those with racialized ethnic identities, can promote sociolegal justice and protect the rule of law over authority.

One of Professor González’s major research areas examines “food justice as interracial justice” and “the food-sharing cases,” constitutional and statutory challenges to municipal laws that criminalize, or otherwise regulate, religious and political activists who publicly share food with homeless, impoverished, or otherwise hungry people (typically in city-owned parks, sidewalks, and/or streets). He also writes “critical ethnic legal histories,” detailing oft-forgotten pasts wherein racialized ethnic minority groups cultivated interracial solidarity in labor movements and civil rights litigation to advance an emancipatory vision of social justice.

Another branch of his research seeks to educate Anglophone legal scholars and others who are concerned by ubiquitous electronic surveillance but relatively ignorant of the post-dictatorship Latin American jurisprudence of habeas data, and he has recently called to reframe contemporary U.S. law and society as an attempted “Second Redemption” and within the global history of postfascism.

Most of his scholarship is available via the Publications tab of this webpage, the Social Science Research Network, and his Academia webpage.

In addition to numerous law review articles, Professor González coauthored Richard Delgado et al., Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials (West Academic 2d ed. 2021) and the American Bar Association report, Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps (2010) (with Tucker B. Culbertson and UNM Law Professor Emerita Margaret Montoya). He has also contributed to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law, and Social Movements (2015); Law Professor and Accidental Historian: The Scholarship of Michael A. Olivas (Ediberto Román ed., Carolina Academic Press 2017); and Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Property Opinions (Eloisa C. Rodriguez-Dod & Elena Maria Marty-Nelson eds., Cambridge University Press 2021).

Prior Experience

From 2007 to 2011, Professor González taught part-time at several universities, including Golden Gate University School of Law, San Francisco State University Department of Latina/Latino Studies, and University of California, Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, where he was named a Chancellor's Public Scholar, 2010–11, for his curricular, pedagogical, and scholarly innovation regarding the history of San Francisco Bay Area legal advocacy organizations.

From 2006 to 2010, he worked as a staff attorney at the Alameda County Homeless Action Center, where he represented individuals seeking federal disability or state welfare benefits and/or to dismiss criminal charges (typically infraction citations) associated with being homeless and/or mentally disabled. He also advocated locally for policies to protect poor people’s access to year-round county welfare benefits and to establish the City of Oakland municipal identification card program, and during those years, he was active in various bar associations, including as an officer or director of the Berkeley Law Foundation, Centro Legal de la Raza, East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, and National Lawyers Guild (nationally and for the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Before becoming a lawyer, Professor González worked for or interned at the East Bay Community Law Center; Sundeen, Salinas and Pyle; and Kazan Law, supporting plaintiffs’ litigation regarding, inter alia, asbestos poisoning, affordable housing, employment discrimination, trust administration, and workers’ compensation.

Courses

Ethics

Course Description

We will study the rules governing the professional conduct of lawyers and explore the values of the legal system which justify and explain those rules. Specific subject matter includes: the duties of competence, confidentiality, and loyalty; acquisition and retention of clients (including undertaking representation, advertising, solicitation, and withdrawal from representation); and problems concerning the manner of representation (the "Principle of Professionalism" and "zealous advocacy within the bounds of the law"). Concepts will be illustrated through application of the rules to problems, use of video and audio clips for discussion, supplementary readings, and student presentations of rules and cases related to assigned fact patterns. In addition to the traditional final essay examination, quizzes on various topics, using questions taken directly from the MPRE practice exams, will be given throughout the semester.

Intellectual Property Law

Course Description

This course surveys the components of Intellectual Property Law, including the Law of Ideas, Copyrights, the Right of Publicity, Trademark Law, Unfair Competition Law, Trade Secrets, Patent Law. The marketing of Intellectual Property related goods represents one of the most dynamic sectors of the U.S. and world economy. U.S. exports of all intellectual property products are second only to those of aircraft.

Latinas, Latinos, and the Law

Course Description

Hispanic” and “Latino” name a U.S. Census category of ethnicity. In 2019, people included in this category numbered over 60 million, or 18.3%, of the U.S. population; constituted 49.1% of New Mexico’s population; and are projected to increase for at least the next four decades. How have colonization, history, law, patriarchy, political economy, racism, and slavery shaped the social conditions of diverse Hispanic / Latino peoples? How do they relate with peoples racialized across the color line, including, inter alia, those with heritages from Africa, Asia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Europe and the indigenous nations of the “New World?” How can lawyers use this critical knowledge to help chart the future of New Mexico and the United States? Through this writing seminar, students will learn how U.S. law mediated the territorial incorporation, and contradictory inclusion and exclusion, of diverse Hispanic / Latino peoples. Students will review and learn about constitutional jurisprudence; civil rights, criminal, immigration, and labor law; patterns of migration; and myriad social struggles in order to research and write an original paper on a subject of their choosing—relevant to the course themes—in order to expand their understanding of U.S. law and society.

Property I

Course Description

This first year course is an introduction to the basic concepts of property law, focusing on the role of possession in allocating the various rights and responsibilities connected with personal and real property. The course covers acquisition of initial property rights, adverse possession, donative transfers, the evolution and nomenclature of interests in estates in land and future interests, concurrent property rights, and may also include marital property rights or takings.

Wills and Trusts

Course Description

This course surveys the law of wills and trusts. Topics covered include intestate succession, will execution, will revocation, will contests, will substitutes, planning for incapacity, trusts, and problems arising during trust administration.  Students will be expected to draft a basic will.

Publications

Books:

Richard Delgado, Leticia M. Saucedo, Marc-Tizoc González, Jean Stefancic & Juan F. Perea, Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials (West Academic 2d ed. 2021).

Book Chapters:

Commentary: Botiller v. Dominguez, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Property Opinions (Eloisa C. Rodriguez-Dod & Elena Maria Marty-Nelson eds., 2021).

Available at: Cambridge U. Press

La gran lucha: Michael A. Olivas, Breaking the Law on Principle and Confronting the Risks of Representation,
Law Professor and Accidental Historian: The Scholarship of Michael A. Olivas (Ediberto Roman ed. 2017).
Available at: CAP Press

Antonia Hernandez and Three Strikes Law, Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Politics, Law and Social Movements (2015).
Available at: Oxford U. Press

Articles:

Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory: LatCrit Theory, Praxis and Community, 12(2) REV. DIREITO e PRÁX. 1316 (2021) (co-authored with Saru Matambanadzo & Sheila I. Vélez Martínez) .
Available at: UNM-DR

Foreword, The Dispossessed Majority: Resisting the Second Redemption in América Posfascista (Postfascist America) with LatCrit, Scholarship, Community, and Praxis amidst the Global Pandemic, 23 Harvard Latinx L. Rev. 149 (2020) (co-authored with Saru Matambanadzo & Sheila I. Vélez Martínez).

Available at: Harvard Latinx Law Review

John Makdisi on the Intercultural Origins of the Common Law, 14 INTERCULTRAL HUM. L. REV. (2019).
Available at: SSRN

Uncompromising Hunger for Justice: Resistance, Sacrifice, and LatCrit Theory, 16 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 727 (2018) (co-authored with Brenda Williams and Edwin Lindo).

Available at: Journal for Social Justice

Criminalizing Charity: Can First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion, RFRA, and RLUIPA Protect People who Share Food in Public?, 7 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 291 (2017).
Available at: Irvine Law Review

La Gran Lucha: Latina and Latino Lawyers, Breaking the Law on Principle, and Confronting the Risks of Representation, 13 HASTINGS RACE & POVERTY L. REV. 61 (2016).
Available at: Race & Poverty Law Review

Afterword - Habeas Data: Comparative Constitutional Interventions from Latin America against Neoliberal States of Insecurity and Surveillance, 90 CHICAGO KENT L. REV. 641 (2015).
Available at: Kent Law Review

Hunger, Poverty, and the Criminalization of Food Sharing in the New Gilded Age, 23 AM. U. J. GENDER & SOC. POL'Y & L. 231 (2015).
Available at: Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Critical Ethnic Legal Histories: Unearthing the Interracial Justice of Filipino Agricultural Labor Organizing, 3 U. C. IRVINE L. REV. 991 (2013).
Available at: Irvine Law Review

LatCrit XV Symposium Foreword: Fifteen Years of Reconstructing the World, 14 HARV. LATINX L. REV. 243 (2011) (co-authored with César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández).

Food Justice as Interracial Justice, 43 U. MIAMI INTER-AM. L. REV. 207 (2011) (co-authored with Christopher J. Curran).
Available at Inter-American Law Review

The Latcrit task force recommendations: Findings and recommendations of a self-study of the latcrit board, 2009, 18 AM. U. J. GENDER SOC. POL'Y & L. 853 (2010) (co-authored with Yanira Reyes, Belkys Torres, Charles R. Venator-Santiago).
Available at Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Latina/o (Public/legal) Intellectuals Social Crises and Contemporary Social Movements, 18 AM. U. J. GENDER SOC. POL'Y & L. 787 (2010).
Available at Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Cluster Introduction: Education and Pedagogy: Counter-Disciplinarity in the Critical Education Tradition in LatCrit Theory, 8 SEATTLE J. FOR SOC. JUST. 107 (2009).
Available at Journal for Social Justice

Afterword: Change and Continuity: An Introduction to LatCrit Taskforce Recommendations, 8 SEATTLE J. FOR SOC. JUST. 303 (2009).
Available at Journal for Social Justice

Cluster II: Tracing the Critical Education Tradition in LatCrit Theory, Praxis & Community, 4 FIU L. REV. 85 (2008).
Available at FIU Law Review

Toward a New Student Insurgency: A Critical Epistolary, 94 CAL. L. REV. 1879 (2006) (co-authored with Rachel Anderson & Stephen Lee).
Available at California Law Review

Bar & Trade Publications

Visibly Fragile America (reviewing Etienne C. Toussaint’s Of American Fragility: Public Rituals, Human Rights, and The End of Invisible Man), JOTWELL Poverty Law (Jan. 4, 2021).

Available at: JOTWELL Poverty Law

Socially Active Law Teaching: Lessons Learned, AALS New Law Professors Section Annual Newsletter (Dec. 2017), http://www.law.uh.edu/news/faculty-news/fall2017/Olivas4.pdf.

Recognizing Disgust, Repudiating, Exile (Sarah Rankins' The Influence of Exile), JOTWELL POVERTY L. (October 25, 2016).
Available at: JOTWELL Poverty Law

Reports

Report and Recommendations—Legal Scholar Team, Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps (April 2010) (co-authored with Tucker Culbertson and Margaret Montoya).
Available at: UNM-DR

Oakland City ID Card Proposal (Oakland City ID Card Coalition, 2008) (co-authored with Jesse Newmark, et al.).
Available at: Oakland City

Popular Press:

Arce v. Douglas, the Arizona Ethic Stuides Case, NUESTRAS VOCES LATINAS (Aug. 19, 2015).
Available at: Nuestras Voces Laninas (archive)

Fort Lauderdale's Rules Criminalize and Infringe on Liberty, SUN SENTINEL (Nov. 12, 2017).
Available at: Sun Sentinel

Blogs:

California Assembly Bill 2178 Threatens Food Sharing Throughout the State, FoodSharingLaw.net (Sept. 18, 2018).

Available at: FoodSharingLaw.net

Eleventh Circuit Rules that the First Amendment Protects the “Expressive Conduct” of
Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs­—Part I of II, FoodSharingLaw.net (Sept. 5, 2018).

Available at: FoodSharingLaw.net

Briefs

Brief of Amici Curiae Law Professors & Indian Law Experts in Support of Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Smith v. United States, (2023).

Available at: UNM-DR

Brief for Florida Legal Services, Inc., Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc., and Society of American Law Teachers, Inc as Amici Curiae, Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs v. City of Fort Lauderdale, (2017) (U.S. CT. APPEALS 11th CIR. NO. 16-16808). 
Available at: Southern Legal Files

Brief for Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc. as Amicus Curiae, Arce v. Douglas, (2015) (U.S. CT. APPEALS 9th CIR.).
Available at: LatCrit