Associate Professor of Law
Director, Criminal Justice Reform Lab
Courses Taught
- Criminal Law
- Criminal Justice Reform
Links
Education
- BS, summa cum laude, George Washington University
- JD, UC Berkeley School of Law
Background
Professor Michael Serota teaches and writes about criminal law, public policy, and legal ethics. He is an internationally recognized mens rea scholar who studies the foundations—empirical, moral, and political—of criminal legislation and doctrine. Professor Serota specializes in developing interdisciplinary projects that bring together experts from across academia and the policy world. His current efforts, run through Professor Serota’s Criminal Justice Reform Lab, include:
- Conducting the first-ever nationally representative survey of public attitudes on mens rea and the influence of culpable mental states on moral judgment in collaboration with a philosopher and a criminologist at the University of Surrey, and a sociologist at Indiana University.
- Conducting a systematic content analysis of fifty years of legislative debate over criminal law reform in collaboration with criminologists at Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, a legal director at the ACLU, and a computer scientist at Cal Poly.
- Conducting the first ever empirical analysis of mens rea reform in collaboration with social scientists at the RAND Corporation and Arnold Ventures.
Professor Serota is the author of more than 30 articles, essays, and opinion pieces. His writing can be found in print journals such as the New York University Law Review, California Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review, the online publications of the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and news outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Professor Serota's research has been translated into two languages and cited hundreds of times, including by state and federal courts, casebooks, and legal treatises. His most recent article, Mens Rea & The Public, is the focus of the U.C. Davis Law Review’s 2027 annual online symposium.
Professor Serota is a Senior Research Scholar with the Academy for Justice at Arizona State University, and a Co-Principal Investigator—along with researchers from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic—of the Agency, Intentions, and Artificial Intelligence Project. Professor Serota also advises state governments, reform organizations, and media outlets on criminal justice reform, building on his years of legislative experience. Prior to entering academia, Professor Serota served as the chief policy counsel for the only ground-up criminal code reform project to take place in the United States since the 1980s.