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Shawn Fields

Shawn Fields

Professor of Law

Phone
(619) 525-1686
Department
Faculty

Biography

Shawn Fields is a Professor of Law at California Western School of Law. He studies, writes, and teaches mainly in the fields of criminal law and constitutional criminal procedure, with a focus on the Fourth Amendment and police reform. Fields also teaches Civil Procedure, and he has written extensively about immigration law and firearms law and policy.

Fields’s articles have appeared or will appear in a number of law reviews, including the University of Chicago Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and Washington Law Review, among others. 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” is forthcoming 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.

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.

Fields previously practiced law for a number of years, serving as a California criminal appellate specialist representing clients raising constitutional challenges to police and prosecutorial misconduct 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. He also served as lead or co-lead counsel on a number of civil matters, representing both plaintiffs and defendants in employment, consumer, securities, and civil rights actions. Fields has also served on the San Diego Community Review Board on Police Practices and the American Bar Association’s Legal Education Police Practices Consortium. Prior to joining California Western, Fields served as a Professor of Legal Writing at the University of San Diego School of Law and an Assistant Professor of Law at Campbell University School of Law. 

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

  • 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).