Bruce Riordan

Bruce Riordan is an assistant United States attorney and the special counsel to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California. In that capacity, he is the responsible for overseeing the Office’s Public Affairs and Community Outreach efforts, including its efforts in the and Consumer Protection field.

From January 2007 through August 2010, he was the chief of the Gang Division for the City Attorney of Los Angeles where he supervised the implementation and enforcement of the City 43 civil gang injunctions as well the enforcement of all criminal street gang matters in the City Attorney’s Office.

Before starting work with the City of Los Angeles in January 2007, he spent 15 years with the U.S. Department of Justice as an assistant U.S. attorney. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was a deputy chief of the Terrorism and Organized Crime Section of the Office where he directed federal gang prosecutions and lead federal task forces investigating the criminal activities of the 18th Street Gang, the MS-13 Gang, the Rolling 60s Neighborhood Crips Gang, and the Mexican Mafia. In that capacity, he charged and successfully prosecuted the first federal racketeering case against a California street gang. While at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was cross-designated as a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney to prosecute Rolling 60s Neighborhood Crips gang members for a series of state felonies. As deputy chief of the Terrorism and Organized Crime Section, Riordan worked on and supervised matters of domestic and international terrorism and in 2004, he successfully prosecuted the nation's first federal conviction of a member of the radical domestic organization known as the Earth Liberation Front.

In 2002, Riordan was awarded the “Director’s Award” by the U.S. Department of Justice for the successful prosecution and conviction, after a three month trial, of 26 members and associates of the Mexican Mafia and the 18th Street Gang for assorted federal racketeering violations including murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, extortion, narcotics distribution, money laundering and weapons possession. In 2009, The California Lawyer Magazine named Riordan one of the “California Lawyers of the Year” for his work with the City of Los Angeles to reform the use of civil gang injunctions. He is also a lecturer at the USC Gould School of Law, where he teaches Trial Advocacy.

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Bloomberg Tax
September 22, 2020
Re: Nomi Stolzenberg

Nomi Stolzenberg was quoted in an article about whether or not religious judges can keep their faith separate from their rulings. Stolzenberg said, “[Amy Barrett] is being selected to fulfill a half century campaign to take back the courts, to return religion to the public square, to dismantle a style of secularist constitutional interpretation that religious conservatives find objectionable."

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Lessons from Luckin Coffee: The Underappreciated Risks of Variable Interest Entities," Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, July 28, 2020.

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Big is not necessarily bad," The Hill, July 30, 2020.

Edward McCaffery
July, 2020

“The Death of the Income Tax (or, The Rise of America's Universal Wage Tax),” Indiana Law Journal  95 (2020): 1233.