Darrell Mavis
USC Gould School of Law

Judge Mavis has presided over 100 jury trials since his appointment to the Superior Court of California in 2006. For more than a decade, he supervised 40 civil and criminal judges in the Pasadena, Burbank, Glendale and Alhambra courthouses.

Judge Mavis studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University and received a BS in economics from MIT as well as a JD from Harvard Law School.

Judge Mavis tried more than 100 jury trials as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorney for 14 years. He prosecuted some of the district attorney’s most complex and high-profile cases including one of California’s largest “no-body” murder cases. He successfully tried a 17-year-old, double murder case that involved the killing of two special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as the almost fatal wounding of a third special agent during an international, undercover sting operation. He was also an appointed attorney liaison at the United States Department of Justice, Office of International Affairs, where he worked on international criminal matters for state and local prosecutors throughout the United States for two years.

Judge Mavis has spoken on over 200 occasions at the California Center for Judicial Education and Research, Los Angeles Superior Court Judicial Education Seminars, the California State Bar and various state and national bar associations on topics including: conducting a jury trial, criminal law, evidence, experts, trial skills, dispute resolution, ethics and civility. Since 2008, Judge Mavis has been a faculty member of the B.E. Witkin Judicial College of California, teaching over 1,000 judges throughout the state. Judge Mavis has published articles on scientific evidence, criminal street gangs and consular notification. He was the past chair of the State Bar’s Criminal Law Section Executive Committee. He is the vice-chair of the California Center for Judicial Education and Research Advisory Committee, which develops and delivers education to members of the California Judicial Branch.

For over a decade, Judge Mavis was a member of the visiting faculty for the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop. Judge Mavis has been a member of Southwestern Law School’s adjunct faculty since 1996, teaching Trial Advocacy and the Art of Persuasion. For several years, he created and taught a Persuasive Speaking course at UCLA. Judge Mavis has been a lecturer in law at USC Gould School of Law since 2015.

In 2008, the Constitutional Rights Foundation awarded Judge Mavis “Judge of the Year.”

 

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Bloomberg Government
June 22, 2022
Re: Franita Tolson

Franita Tolson was interviewed about how federal lawsuits from North Carolina, Alabama, and Arkansas test the limits of the Voting Rights Act, the boundaries of state government authority, and the ability of voting rights groups to file racial gerrymandering cases. “These doctrines and approaches in these cases fundamentally reset the rules of the game,” she said. “In 2030 we will live in a completely different world than we lived in in 2020, and 2020 was not favorable to minority voters at all.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Robin Craig
March, 2022

"Saltwater Sovereignty: Tribal Marine Management Authority Along the Pacific Coast.” Online Environmental Law Workshop. University of Maryland School of Law, Baltimore, MD.

Daniel Klerman
March, 2022

“Comment on Choi, Erickson, & Pritchard, ‘Coalitions among Plaintiffs’ Attorneys in Securities Class Actions’,” Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, Virtual, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Robin Craig
March, 2022

“Who’s on First? The Mind-Blowing Attempt to Conceptualize Deference in the Midst of Decision Delays and Agency Repeals,” J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Environmental Law Symposium for the George Washington University School of Law, Virtual, Washington, D.C.