Professor Justin P. Brooks, California Western School of Law

Named as one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California by The Los Angeles Daily Journal, and one of the top criminal defense attorneys and legal educators in San Diego by The Daily Transcript, Professor Justin Brooks is the Director of the California Innocence Project, the Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy, and California Western’s LL.M. in Trial Advocacy Specializing in Federal Criminal Law. Professor Brooks has served as counsel on several high profile cases that have resulted in exonerations of inmates who were wrongfully convicted. Prior to coming to California, Professor Brooks practiced as a criminal defense attorney in Washington D.C., Michigan, and Illinois, where he represented inmates on death row and obtained the reversal of a death sentence. He began his teaching career as a professor at Georgetown Law Center. He has also taught at Thomas Cooley and visited as a professor at Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, Victoria University (New Zealand), University of Sheffield (U.K.), South Texas College of Law’s Prague and Malta summer programs, and New England School of Law’s Galway summer program. For ten years Professor Brooks has been involved in training programs throughout Latin American teaching advocacy skills, forensic science, corrections law, and juvenile justice.  Recently he co-founded Inocente! with Professor Jamie Cooper, a program dedicated to assisting South American criminal defense attorneys and reforming justice systems.  Professor Brooks has published extensively on the death penalty, corrections and sentencing law, and other criminal law issues. 
For more information about Professor Brooks, please visit his webpage at
http://www.cwsl.edu/main/default.asp?nav=faculty.asp&header=faculty.gif&body=brooks/

For a reading list of the course please go here

Professor Christina L. Kunz, William Mitchell College of Law

Christina L. Kunz is Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has taught since 1980. Her teaching areas include Contracts, UCC Sales, Electronic Commercial Transactions, International Sales of Goods, UCC Payments, Negotiating and Drafting Business Agreements (focused on technology contracts), Online Games Seminar/Virtual Law, and Legal Research and Writing. With co-authors, she has written and published textbooks on UCC Sales, Legal Research, and Legal Writing. Her new Contracts textbook is being published by West Publishing in Spring 2010. Professor Kunz is a member of the American Law Institute, where she served on the members’ consultative group for the recently completed Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. She currently is a vice chair of the American Bar Association Cyberspace Law Committee and a co-chair of the new Electronic Commercial Law Committee in the Minnesota State Bar Association. During much of the 1990s, she was an American Bar Association Observer to the NCCUSL Drafting Committee on UCC Article 2, and in the early 1990s, she was a member of the American Bar Association working group that drafted the term “record” and its definition, used widely in electronic commerce legislation. For more information about Professor Kunz, visit her webpage at http://www.wmitchell.edu/academics/faculty/Kunz.asp.

Professor Mark Weinstein

Professor Mark Weinstein joined the faculty of California Western School of Law in July, 1992. He has taught Legal Negotiation, Interviewing Counseling and Negotiation, Civil Procedure I and II, and supervises students in California Western’s Clinical Internship Program. Weinstein is a two-time winner of the “Teacher of the Year Award” selected by students, was the Associate Dean for Administration for 5 1/2 years, and was the faculty coach for the school’s ABA Negotiation Competition Teams for many years which included winning teams on the regional level and successful participation in the nationals. He has written a textbook on Civil Litigation and articles in the areas of law firm dissolution, clinical internships, and a current work in progress in the area of veterinary lien laws. Professor Weinstein has lectured at the University of Chile Law School on US Civil Procedure and Comparative Family Law (US, Chile and Germany). In addition, Weinstein presented a lecture at the Conference on Civil Procedure Reform, Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile, June 2007, on “The Discovery Process in the United States.” Prior to joining the faculty of California Western, Weinstein was a clinical professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In addition, he was a partner in a law firm in Allentown, Pennsylvania and was a staff attorney for Central Pennsylvania Legal Services in Reading, PA, and a managing attorney of Lehigh Valley Legal Services in Allentown, PA. Professor Weinstein earned his B.A. degree from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and his J.D. degree (with honors) from The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC. For more information about Professor Weinstein, visit his webpage at http://www.cwsl.edu/main/default.asp?nav=faculty.asp&header=faculty.gif&body=mweinstein/home.asp.

Professor Al Macina, California Western School of Law

Professor Al Macina received his Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Florida and Juris Doctor from California Western School of Law.  Between undergraduate and law school he served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer, living and working in a rural village in Mali, West Africa for over two years, followed by work at several law firms before studying law.  After working for several years as an associate attorney at a private criminal defense firm, Professor Macina opened a solo criminal defense practice in San Diego, California in 2007, specializing in state and federal trial-level criminal defense and juvenile delinquency cases, appeals and other post-conviction relief services.  He has appeared before the California Courts of Appeal and California Supreme Court.  In 2004, Professor Macina interned with the Ninth Region's Defensoría Penal Pública (Public Defender's Office) in Chile, one of two pilot regions that first implemented oral trials and a new Chilean public defense system.  Licensed to practice in California and before the United States District Court for the Southern District of California and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, Professor Macina is a member of the San Diego County Bar Association, the California Appellate Defense Council and the American Inns of Court, Louis M. Welsh Chapter.  He also receives appointed indigent felony appeal cases as a panel attorney for Appellate Defenders of San Diego, Inc.