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About USC Gould
USC Gould is a top-ranked law school with a 120-year history and reputation for academic excellence. We are located on the beautiful 228-acre USC University Park Campus, just south of downtown Los Angeles.
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USC Gould helps prepare you for a stellar legal career. You can pursue a JD degree, one of our numerous graduate and international offerings, or an online degree or certificate.
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We work closely with students, graduates and employers to support successful career goals and outcomes. Our overall placement rate is consistently strong, with 94 percent of our JD class employed within 10 months after graduation.
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Faculty
Our faculty is distinguished for its scholarship, as well as for its commitment to teaching. Our 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio creates an intimate and collegial learning environment.
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Bernadette Atuahene
USC Gould School of Law
- FACULTY DIRECTORY
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Professor of Law
Email: batuahene@law.usc.edu699 Exposition Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90089-0074 USA
Last Updated: June 14, 2023
Bernadette Atuahene is a property law scholar focusing on land stolen from people in the African Diaspora. She is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who grew up in Los Angeles and earned her bachelor's degree at UCLA. She then earned her JD from Yale Law School and her MPA from Harvard. After completing her graduate studies, she served as a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and then practiced as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York. She was previously the James E. Jones Chair at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Atuahene has worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the South African Land Claims Commission, and has also directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. She has been honored with the Fulbright Fellowship, the Council on Foreign Relation’s International Affairs Fellowship and Princeton University’s Law and Public Affairs Fellowship. Her first book — We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press, 2014) — is based on 150 interviews she conducted with South Africans dispossessed of their land by the colonial and apartheid governments and who received some form of compensation post-apartheid.
Atuahene won a National Science Foundation award for her current project about racialized property tax administration in Detroit, which has received several accolades, including the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Award for best paper on race in 2020. In addition to publishing two New York Times op-eds and appearing on national news shows such as Democracy Now! and the Tavis Smiley Show to discuss her Detroit work, she has also published academic articles in journals such as California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review and Southern California Law Review.
FACULTY IN THE NEWS
Annenberg Media
September 19, 2023
Re: Thomas Lenz
Thomas Lenz was quoted by Annenberg Media about the United Automobile Workers union ready to go on strike. "Strikes affect the livelihoods of those who choose to stop working. To the extent those persons aren’t earning money to spend that means stores, restaurants, and other businesses might not be as busy. If a strike lasts a long time bills might not get paid as easily, if at all," Lenz wrote.
RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
Mugambi Jouet
August, 2023
“Guns, Mass Incarceration, and Bipartisan Reform: Beyond Vicious Circle and Social Polarization,” 55 Arizona State Law Journal 239 (2023).
Edward McCaffery
August, 2023
"The Curiouser and Curiouser Case of Carried Interest" (with Darryll K. Jones), Arizona Law Review (Spring 2024).
Scott Altman
August, 2023
"Are Parents Fiduciaries," 42 Law and Philosophy 431 (2023).