Yxta Maya Murray

Yxta Maya Murray, Professor of Law, William M. Rains Fellow

David P. Leonard Professor of Law
William M. Rains Fellow

Courses Taught

  • Criminal Law
  • Property Law
  • Women and the Law
  • Law and Literature
  • Sentencing
  • Sexual Orientation and the Law

Links

Education

  • BA, cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles
  • JD, cum laude, Stanford Law School

Background

After law school, Yxta Murray clerked for the Honorable Harry Hupp in the Central District of California and then for the Honorable Ferdinand Fernandez of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena. She joined the Loyola Law School faculty in 1995, and writes and practices in a variety of fields. She teaches Criminal Law, Property Law, Law and Literature, and Women and the Law.

Scholarship in Legal Periodicals 

Professor Murray writes about Community Constitutionalism, Criminal Law, Property Law, Gender Justice, and Law and Literature. She also writes about the relationship between law and visual, conceptual, and performance art. She has published law review articles in the California Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender & LawThe Michigan Journal of Race & LawUnbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, the N.Y.U Journal of Law & Social Change, and Law and Literature.

Interdisciplinary Work 

Murray’s work in community legal thought found expression in an art show titled Drawn Together, which launched in 2020 at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York's Lower East Side. Her co-artists in this project, which studies power inequities in artists' contracts, are Mira Dayal, Simon Wu, Maia Chao, and Anais Duplan. 

Books

Nonfiction

“WE MAKE EACH OTHER BEAUTIFUL:” ART, ACTIVISM, AND THE LAW, Cornell University Press, 2024.  

Novels

THE HISTORY OF HAZARDOUS OBJECTS, University of Nevada Press, 2024. 

GOD WENT LIKE THAT, Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023. 

ART IS EVERYTHING, TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2021. 

THE GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO GETTING KIDNAPPED, Razorbill/Penguin, (2009).  

THE KING'S GOLDHarperCollins, 2007.  

THE QUEEN JADE, HarperCollins, 2004. 

THE CONQUEST, HarperCollins, 2002.  

WHAT IT TAKES TO GET TO VEGAS, Grove/Atlantic, 1999.  

LOCAS, Grove/Atlantic 1997. 

Short Fiction Collection

THE WORK DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY, BUT IT COULD, University of Nevada Press, 2020. 

Play 

ADVICE AND CONSENT (LARB BOOKS, 2019) (with Kathleen Kim, Loyola Law School Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion, who wrote the score and the Introduction). 

Short Film

ADVICE AND CONSENT (2019) (with Kathleen Kim). 

Selected Recent Scholarship

“We have to have hope that things will change:” Interview with Rocío Madrigal, BERKELEY JOURNAL OF GENDER, LAW & JUSTICE, forthcoming. 

People v. Juan Villa Ramirez, YALE JOURNAL OF LAW AND THE HUMANITIES, forthcoming. 

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and The Force Requirement in Rape Law, 33 LAW AND LITERATURE 3 (2021). 

Blights Out and Property Rights in New Orleans Post-Katrina, 68 BUFFALO LAW REVIEW 1 (2020). 

  • Winner of an Art Writer’s Grant from the Warhol Foundation in connection with Creative Capital.  

Epistemic Injustice in Puerto Rico, 55 WILLAMETTE LAW REVIEW 321 (2019). 

  • Listed in the top 10 law review articles of the year for 2018 by Lawrence Solum in his Legal Theory Blog. 

Recent Short Fiction and Poetry

The Witch, CONJUNCTIONS: WORKS AND DAYS, forthcoming. 

Titanic, CONJUNCTIONS: WAYS OF WATER, Spring 2023. 

All Systems Go, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, Spring 2023. 

Bakersfield, CONJUNCTIONS: ONWORD, Spring 2023. 

Three Poems on Art, NOVEMBER MAGAZINE, February 8, 2022. 

Before the Law, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, Winter 2022.

Selected Journalism, Criticism, Interviews, and Essays

Essay on Made in L.A., CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LOS ANGELES, forthcoming. 

Essay on Christopher Gregory-Rivera, APERTURE, forthcoming. 

 Yxta Maya Murray Interviewed by William Corwin, RAIN TAXI, June 2023. 

 Interview with Andrew Tonkovich about God Went Like That, BIBLIOCRACY, March 23, 2023. 

 Yxta Maya Murray Q&A with Daniel Olivas, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS, March 19, 2023

 Review of Afro-Atlantic Histories at LACMACONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LOS ANGELES, February 2023

 Review of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living, THE GEORGIA REVIEW, Winter 2022

Yxta Maya Murray on Gordon Parks’ 1960s-era Photographs of Stokely CarmichaelAPERTUREWinter 2022. 

Sandra Cisneros May Put You in a Poem, THE NEW YORKER.comSeptember 21, 2022. 

Curation

Curator, Art in the Age of Emergency, Women's Center for Creative Work, May 10, 2020 (Zoom).

Co-Curator, field works: a dam, an interview, a slur, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, August 11, 2020 (Zoom) (with Andrew Freire).

Grants, Prizes, Residencies, and other Good Things

Women’s International Study Center, Residency, July 2024. 

Djerassi Foundation, Residency, July 2023. 

Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation Grant, for GOD WENT LIKE THAT, 2022. 

Yaddo, Residency, August-September 2022. 

The Lighthouse Works, Residency, May-June, 2022. 

Huntington Library, Short Term Fellow, 2022. 

ART IS EVERYTHING selected for The Books That Made Us Think and Act Differently This Year, Vox, Dec. 9, 2021. 

Co-grantee, City Arts Corps Grants, New York Foundation of the Arts, for Drawn Together, 2021. 

The Mesa Refuge, Residency, Summer, 2021. 

Willapa Bay AIR, Residency, Summer 2021. 

Paradise reprinted in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2021 (Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor, eds). 

The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, chosen as a best book of 2020 by BUZZFEED MAGAZINE. 

Ucross Foundation, Residency, Spring 2019. 

Finalist, 2019 ASME Award in Fiction. 

Art Writer’s Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation in association with Creative Capital, 2018. 

MacDowell, Residency, 2001. 

Whiting Writers’ Award, 1999. 

Recent Selected Recent Talks

Presentation of We Make Each Other Beautiful, UC Berkeley School of Law, Spring, TBD. 

Presentation of We Make Each Other Beautiful, Louisiana State University Law School, Spring, TBD. 

Conversation with Myriam Gurba about CREEP, North Figuera Book Shop, October 15, 2023. 

Presentation of The People of California v. Juan Villa Ramírez, Yale Law School, September 29, 2023. 

Reading from God Went Like That, Skylight Books, August 25, 2023. 

Reading from God Went Like That, Djerassi, July 15, 2023. 

Reading from God Went Like That and Craft Talk, Stanford Law School, May 12, 2023. 

Reading from God Went Like That with author Dan Selmi, The Thoreau Society, April 20, 2023. 

Reading from God Went Like That, Beyond Baroque, April 8, 2023. 

Conversation about God Went Like That with Dan Selmi, Loyola Law School, April 4, 2023. 

Conversation with Jocelyn Saidenberg about God Went Like That, City Lights Bookstore, on Zoom, March 30, 2023.  

Reading from God Went Like That, Vroman’s Book Store, March 17, 2023. 

Conversation with Raquel Gutiérrez about Brown Neon, Self-Help Graphics, September 30, 2022.