A renowned legal scholar deeply committed to legal education, public service and social justice, Mario Barnes is this year’s recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Achievement award.

Mario currently serves as the UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of law and the director of the law school’s Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEAR), which he helped to launch during his initial tenure at the university from 2009 to 2018. During that period, he held positions as professor of law, senior associate dean for academic affairs, associate dean for faculty development and research, and professor (by courtesy) of criminology, law and society.

For Mario, the opportunity to teach the inaugural law class at UC Irvine allowed him to play a key role in developing the curriculum and fostering a sense of community throughout the program. That same sense of community brought him back “home” to UC Irvine after serving as the Toni Rembe Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law from 2018 to 2021.

Mario’s dedication to legal education and public service includes serving as a law professor at the University of Miami School of Law and as a William H. Hastie Teaching Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. A retired U.S. Navy veteran, he previously worked as a prosecutor, defense counsel and special assistant U.S. attorney. He also served on the commission investigating the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.

In 2025, Mario was elected the next president of the Law and Society Association (LSA), a large sociolegal organization, whose membership and gatherings garner participants from over sixty countries and six continents. He is currently chair-elect of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, an elected member of the American Law Institute and a board member of the Critical Legal Collective – an organization that promotes a more inclusive, democratic, and just society through scholarship, teaching and advocacy.

He received the American Bar Foundation Fellows Outstanding Scholar Award in 2023 and was named a Distinguished Fellow by the National Institute of Military Justice in 2021.