Southwestern Law School is proud to announce that two members of its faculty — Professor Christopher David Ruiz Cameron, Justice Marshall F. McComb Professor of Law, and Professor Meera E. Deo, The Honorable Vaino Spencer Chair — have published major articles in a special symposium issue of the UC Davis Law Review honoring the extraordinary legacy of Dean Kevin R. Johnson, who served fifteen years as dean of the UC Davis School of Law. 

Southwestern is the only law school in the country, other than UC Davis itself, to have two faculty members invited to contribute to the symposium.  

"Standard Deviations: The Origins of Affirmative Action at the Harvard Law Review" 

Professor Cameron's article, Standard Deviations: The Origins of Affirmative Action at the Harvard Law Review, 59 UC Davis L. Rev. 2837 (2026), is the first piece of published scholarship to document the history of affirmative action — and its evolution into diversity, equity, and inclusion — at the nation's most influential student-run law journal. 

The article is also deeply personal. In 1981–82, Cameron and Johnson were second-year editors of the Harvard Law Review when it adopted its headline-grabbing affirmative action plan, and in 1982–83 they were third-year editors when the plan was first implemented. Cameron, who served on the Review's affirmative action committee, draws on a quarter century of historical research as well as firsthand knowledge to situate the Review's adoption of race-conscious membership criteria between two other historical currents: the nineteenth-century legal education reform movement that gave rise to the student-edited law review, and the twenty-first-century decline of affirmative action and the current attacks on DEI. 

"This Article is the culmination of twenty-five years of my professional life's work," said Cameron, the Justice Marshall F. McComb Professor of Law. "It combines historical research with events of which Dean Johnson and I have personal knowledge. I was there — so I am one of the few people in a position to tell the story of why and how affirmative action, and later DEI, came to be adopted by the Review." 

"The Legal Academy: Past, Present, and Future" 

Professor Deo's article, The Legal Academy: Past, Present, and Future, 59 UC Davis L. Rev. 2943 (2026), credits Dean Johnson not only with increasing the numeric representation of women and people of color in the legal academy, but with helping to create the qualitative experience of belonging that is essential to their meaningful participation and success. 

The article marks several firsts. It is the first publication to present findings from the Survey on the Engagement of Law Faculty and Staff (SELFS) — the first comprehensive, full-population quantitative study of law faculty in the United States, administered in 2025 at twenty law schools, including Southwestern, with an excellent 60% response rate. And it is the first time in Deo's career as an empirical scholar that she has analyzed an individual by name in her research. 

About the Symposium 

The symposium issue, published this month by the UC Davis Law Review (Volume 59, Issue 5), celebrates Dean Johnson's transformative contributions to legal education, including his scholarship in immigration law, his mentorship of generations of junior scholars, and his creation of one of the nation's few majority-minority law faculties. The full issue is available online at the UC Davis Law Review website: https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu. 

About Southwestern Law School 

Southwestern Law School, located in Los Angeles, has served the legal profession and the community for more than a century. Its faculty are nationally recognized scholars and teachers committed to advancing access to justice and excellence in legal education.