Bio

Laura E. Gómez is the Lee & Leon Karelitz Chair in Evidence & Procedure at UNM School of Law and the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law Emerita at UCLA. She teaches the required courses in Civil Procedure and Criminal Law, as well as electives in those two areas. Over a 34-year teaching career, she has also taught courses in constitutional law, race and the history of American law, critical race theory, and Latinos and the law. She is faculty advisor to the Latiné American Law Student Association and the Immigration Law Student Association.

Gómez received her B.A. from Harvard College in 1986, majoring in Social Studies, graduating with honors, and being named a Truman Scholar. After college, Gómez worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, a first-term Democrat from New Mexico. The highlight of her time on Capitol Hill was sitting with Bingaman in the well of the Senate, as he successfully offered an amendment Gómez had drafted to the sanctions bill against the apartheid regime in South Africa; the bill eventually was enacted over President Reagan’s veto. Gómez attended Stanford University for her legal and graduate studies, where she was the first person to obtain both a Ph.D. in Sociology (1994) and a law degree (1992) from Stanford; she was the first Mexican American woman in the nation to obtain both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in any field.

After obtaining her J.D. in 1992, Gómez clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable Dorothy Wright Nelson. This 13-month experience remains a highlight of her professional life, and she is proud to have shepherded nearly 100 students into judicial clerkships. In summer 1994, Gómez became an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law, where she received tenure in 2000, becoming the second Latina tenured at an elite American law school (after Rachel F. Moran at UC Berkeley). In 2000, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 and the sharp drop in the enrollment of African American and Latinx law students at UCLA, Gómez and several colleagues founded UCLA’s renowned Critical Race Studies Program. Gómez led the program for five years (as co-director with Jerry Kang from 2000-2002 and as faculty director from 2018-2021).

Gómez made the decision to leave UCLA for the University of New Mexico in 2005 to raise her young son amidst their extended family in Albuquerque. At UNM, she became the first professor with a joint appointment between the School of Law and the College of Arts & Sciences, holding a one-quarter appointment in the American Studies Department and a three-quarters appointment in the law school. She was the inaugural Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the law school. She co-directed the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice (with UNM sociologist Dr. Nancy López).

In 2008, Gómez was elected President of the Law and Society Association, becoming the first person of color to lead the multi-disciplinary, multi-national scholarly association. Gómez returned to the UCLA faculty in 2011 and retired in 2023. Her administrative roles at UCLA included service as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and Interim Dean the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters & Science. The Division of Social Sciences is UCLA’s largest academic unit, consisting of 11 academic departments with nearly 300 tenured/tenure-track faculty.

Gómez has published many law review articles, articles in peer-reviewed journals, and book chapters, and shorter pieces. But it is her four books that have been her most impactful scholarship. She published her first book in 1997 as part of Temple University Press’s Gender, Family and the Law Series-- Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure, an empirically grounded analysis of the racist and sexist claims-making that led to the “crack baby” panic of the late 1980s as part of the war on drugs. In 2007, Gómez published Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race with New York University Press (and they published a 2018 second edition). This book has been adopted in graduate and undergraduate courses in Chicano/a/x studies, ethnic studies and history. The book at once offers a revisionist history of the standard story of “westward expansion” that centers colonialism and racial conflict as well as a sociological theory of race and race-making that centers Mexican Americans in the Southwest. And it has become an important book on New Mexico history.

In 2013, with sociologist Nancy López, Gómez published Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research with Rutgers University Press’s Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Series. In 2020, she published Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism with The New Press. Inventing Latinos was of NPR’s Best Books of 2020 was published in paperback in 2022. In some senses a sequel to Manifest Destinies, Inventing Latinos spans centuries and continents to connect diverse Latinx communities as forming—whether they like it or not—a new, cognizable racial grouping in the U.S. beginning in 1980, when the census first counted “Hispanics.”

Based on her body of published work, including these four books, the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation awarded Gómez the 2021 Outstanding Scholar Award. She received the Clyde Ferguson Jr. Award from the Minority Groups Section of the American Association of Law Schools in 2022. Since 2017, she has been a member of the American Law Institute.

Gómez’ volunteer work includes serving as a member of the board of directors of the ACLU of New Mexico since 2025. She has previously served on the boards of MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) and the School for Advanced Research. From 2022 to 2025, she was a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino.

Gómez was born and raised in New Mexico, graduating from Valley High School in 1982.