Shawn Fields
Professor of Law
Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development
Biography
Shawn Fields is a Professor of Law and the Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development at California Western School of Law. His research focuses on police legitimacy and reform, the Fourth Amendment, criminal theory, immigration and asylum law, and firearms law and policy.
Professor Fields has published in some of the nation’s top law journals, including the University of Chicago Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, and Cornell Law Review. His book, “Neighborhood Watch: Policing White Spaces in America,” was published in 2022 with Cambridge University Press. His forthcoming book, “The New Public Safety: Police Reform and the Lurking Threat to Civil Liberties,” will be published in 2025 with the University of California Press. Fields’s scholarship has been widely cited, including by the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, three state supreme courts, and multiple federal district courts.
Professor Fields’s writings on law and politics also appear regularly in popular media, with his work appearing in Newsweek, Huffington Post, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Charlotte Observer. He is called upon regularly by the media to provide expert insight and has appeared in print, on radio, and on television in both local and national markets.
In addition, Professor Fields has been recognized as an excellent classroom teacher. In 2024-2025, Professor Fields was voted by students as both the 1L Professor of the Year and the Professor of the Year. Fields teaches Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and a seminar on Police Practices and Reform at California Western.
Professor Fields has lent his expertise to a number of service organizations, including by serving on the San Diego Community Review Board on Police Practices, the American Bar Association’s Legal Education Police Practices Consortium, and the AALS Criminal Law Section Executive Board.
Professor Fields practiced law for a number of years prior to entering academia. He began his career at Latham & Watkins LLP in San Francisco and later served as trial counsel for a number of years at a boutique firm in San Diego. Fields also served as a California criminal appellate specialist and as the Executive Director of a refugee rights legal aid NGO in Tanzania, during which time he held a joint appointment with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Fields holds a J.D., magna cum laude, from Boston University School of Law, where he served as an editor on the Boston University Law Review. He received his B.A. from Yale University.
J.D., Boston University School of Law, magna cum laude
B.A., Yale University
Civil Procedure I
Civil Procedure II
Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure I
Police Practices and Reform
Books
- The New Public Safety: Police Reform and the Lurking Threat to Civil Liberties (University of California Press 2025).
- Neighborhood Watch: Policing White Spaces in America (Cambridge University Press 2022).
Articles and Essays
- Police Reform as System Justification, 116 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology ___ (2026).
- Searches and Seizures of the Unhoused, 114 Georgetown Law Journal __ (2026).
- (Non)police Brutality, 110 Cornell Law Review __ (2025).
- The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, 99 Indiana Law Journal 563 (2024).
- The Fourth Amendment Without Police, 90 University of Chicago Law Review 1023 (2023).
- Protest Policing and the Fourth Amendment, 55 U.C. Davis Law Review 347 (2021) (cited by the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals).
- The Elusiveness of Self-Defense for the Black Transgender Community, 21 Nevada Law Journal 975 (2021) (invited symposium essay).
- Second Amendment Sanctuaries, 115 Northwestern University Law Review 437 (2020).
- Sexual Violence and Future Harm: Lessons From Asylum Law, 2020 Utah Law Review 177.
- Institutionalizing Consent Myths in Grade School, 73 Oklahoma Law Review 173 (2020) (invited symposium essay).
- Guns, Knives, and Swords: Policing a Heavily Armed Arizona, 51 Arizona State Law Journal 505 (2019).
- Weaponized Racial Fear, 93 Tulane Law Review 931 (2019).
- Stop and Frisk in a Concealed Carry World, 93 Washington Law Review 1675 (2018) (cited by the Iowa Supreme Court).
- From Guantánamo to Syria: The Extraterritorial Constitution in the Age of “Extreme Vetting,” 39 Cardozo Law Review 1129 (2018).
- Is It Bad Law to Believe a Politician? Campaign Speech and Discriminatory Intent, 52 University of Richmond Law Review 273 (2018).
- Terry, Handguns, and the Hand Formula, 54 Idaho Law Review 467 (2018) (invited symposium essay).
- Debunking the Stranger-in-the-Bushes Myth: The Case for Sexual Assault Protection Orders, 2017 Wisconsin Law Review 429 (cited by Washington Supreme Court and Vermont Supreme Court).
- The Unreviewable Executive? National Security and the Limits of Plenary Power, 84 Tennessee Law Review 731 (2017).
- Private Crimes and Public Forgiveness: Toward a Refined Restorative Justice Amnesty Regime, 5 International Journal of Civil Society Law 2 (2007) (student note).
- Constitutional Comparativism and the Eighth Amendment, 86 Boston University Law Review 963 (2006) (student note).