Professor Ira Ellman is Emeritus Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and on the faculty of the Berkeley Center for Child and Youth Policy.
Professor Ellman’s spent the largest part of his career studying Family Law. He served as Chief Reporter and the Justice Ammi Cutter Reporter of the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, published in 2002 by the American Law Institute. He was the senior author of a leading text on family law that went through 5 editions. His most recent work in family law focused on an empirical investigation into people’s judgments about the obligations the law should require of family members to one another, done in collaboration with social psychologists, work that was extended to the United Kingdom in collaborations established while Professor Ellman was a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2013.
Professor Ellman served on many legislative and judicial committees in Arizona that were concerned with family law and policy, including the Arizona Child Support Guidelines Committee. He has also written on healthcare law and was a founding member of the Bioethics Committee of Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix.
Professor Ellman is currently Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California at Berkeley. His current research, also interdisciplinary, has shifted to the legal policy applied to sex offenders, and especially to those convicted of possession of erotic images of minors.
Professor Ellman served as law clerk for Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court, as legislative aide to Senator Adlai Stevenson III, and a consultant to the California legislature. He also practiced law in San Francisco.
His 2015 article, “ ‘Frightening and High’: The Supreme Court’s Crucial Mistake About Sex Crime Statistics,” has been widely discussed in legal publications and key national media.