Norman Abrams

School of Law, University of California at Los Angeles

Member of the Society Board of Directors
Member of the Editorial Board of the Criminal Law Forum

Norman Abrams retired from the UCLA Law School faculty in 2007 with the titles of Acting Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of Law Emeritus. He has been recalled and continues to teach and write in the areas of federal criminal law, anti-terrorism law, evidence and criminal procedure. Over a long career, he has made scholarly contributions in a number of fields, particularly to the study of prosecutorial discretion, federal criminal law, and evidentiary privileges.

He served as Acting Chancellor of UCLA in 2006-2007.

In 2003-2004, he served as Interim Dean of the School of Law.

From 1991 to 2001, he served as Vice-Chancellor of Academic Personnel for the UCLA campus, overseeing faculty appointments and promotions.

Professor Abrams has been a consultant to numerous state and federal commissions and professional committees, and, while on leave from UCLA in 1966-67 he served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. While attending law school, Professor Abrams was editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review. Before joining UCLA, he served at Columbia Law School as an associate in law and at the Harvard Law School as a research associate and director of the Harvard Brandeis Cooperative Research for Israel's Legal Development.

In 2003, Professor Abrams' casebook on Anti-terrorism and Criminal Enforcement was published. The second edition of this book, the first of its kind on this fast-developing area of the law, appeared in June, 2005. The fourth edition of his casebook, Federal Criminal Law and Its Enforcement (with Beale) was published in February, 2006. He is also a co-author of Evidence--Cases and Materials, 9th ed. (with Weinstein, Mansfield and Berger). His recent article, The Material Support Terrorism Offenses: Perspectives Derived from the (Early) Model Penal Code, was published in 2005 in the first issue of a new journal, the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

Prof. Abrams holds an A.B., University of Chicago, 1952 and his J.D. , University of Chicago, 1955. He has been a member of UCLA Law faculty since 1959.