Jo
Carrillo

Jo Carrillo, J.D., J.S.D. , publishes and teaches on the topic of property and marital property systems, financial intimate partner violence, consumer protection issues, and legal humanities. Currently, her legal research centers on how specific statutes and constellations of statutes can encourage relational equality in intimate partnerships and friendships. She is also interested in mapping financial torts and crimes that are perpetrated in the family.

In the last decade, she has worked to better understand and advance the field of California community property law, the most complex marital property system in the U.S. if not the world. She edited the eleventh edition of a family property casebook that has been in use for the past 60 years. Her other publications in the field include student-oriented texts and academic articles on fundamental changes that marriage equality has initiated in law.

Recently, I completed a monograph on the themes of justice and vigilantism in James M. Cain’s early work. I started archival research for the monograph in 2012. My analysis is more historical than literary.

I am an elected member of the American Law Institute. I am a member of the Modern Language Association. I am a former trustee of the Law and Society Association. I have served on the Herbert Jacob Book Prize Selection Committee. I was on the Board of Authors for the Felix Cohen Handbook of Federal Indian Law (2005).

I am a peer reviewer for different academic journals. For example, I most recently served as a peer reviewer for the start-up Museum of Science Fiction (MOSF) Journal of Science Fiction. When it comes to science fiction I am particularly interested in how speculative fiction imagines and/or re-imagines the institution of property, identity (especially gender), and intimate partnerships.

My permanent academic appointment is at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. I have held temporary appointments over the years. I served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School (1998-99). I was named a Lillian and Harry Hastings Research Chair at UC Hastings (2006-07). I spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at The Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley (2006-07). My current CV is available above.