The University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law will welcome Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 5:30 p.m. for a discussion on crimmigration, the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.

The free event is open to the public and is part of Bowen’s Diversity Week. It is hosted by Bowen’s chapter of the Latin American Law Students Association, and co-sponsored by the UA Little Rock Office of the Chancellor: DEI Fellow Initiatives, the UA Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law Center for Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform, and the law school’s Student Bar Association. Registration is requested to ensure venue capacity. Register here.

For attorney attendees, continuing legal education credit is pending.

Hernández is the Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University where he writes and teaches about the intersection of criminal and immigration law. He is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and legality of criminalizing immigration.

His 2019 book, “Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants,” examines the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. In his 2015 book “Crimmigration Law,” Hernández tracks the legal developments that have created crimmigration law and highlights crimmigration law’s most salient features. A second edition of “Crimmigration Law” is scheduled for release later this month.

His scholarly articles about the right to counsel for migrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing have appeared in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, BYU Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, among others. He also publishes the blog crimmigration.com.

In 2020, Hernández delivered the Buck Colbert Franklin Memorial Civil Rights Lecture at the University of Tulsa, named after the pioneering African-American lawyer who devoted countless hours to assisting victims of the Tulsa Race Riots. In 2019, the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center honored him with its Challenging Discrimination Award. He is a past Fulbright Scholar and has been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley and Texas Southern University. He is also a past recipient of the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award by the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups, an honor issued to a “junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice.”

Hernández will be speaking in Bowen’s Friday Courtroom.