Mary Louise Frampton, Ph.D.

Mary Louise Frampton is the Faculty Director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, a training and research center that educates the next generation of public interest lawyers and conducts community engaged participatory action research on race and poverty. She is a UC Berkeley School of Law professor who teaches in the areas of restorative justice, law and social justice, legislative advocacy, critical race theory, and the delivery of legal services to low-income communities. She teaches and supervises student scholarship for the Scholar Advocate Project, a partnership with the Equal Justice Society that seeks to dismantle the intent requirement in discrimination law and envisions legal doctrine on race and culture that is informed by societal realities and modern scientific findings. In 2011 she was selected as a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Public Scholar to create a new American Cultures course on community-engaged restorative justice that will be taught in the fall of 2012.  

Frampton’s current research interests are focused on the use of restorative justice as a racial justice tool to dismantle the school to prison pipeline, reduce the over-incarceration of people of color in the criminal justice system, and help communities fractured and traumatized by racial violence and the legacies of slavery begin to flourish. She is currently engaged in a participatory action research project in Greensboro, North Carolina using restorative justice approaches to racial healing. She is examining how the pairing of implicit bias training and restorative justice approaches can foster collaboration in its schools, faith communities, and police departments.