Biography
Pilar Margarita Hernández Escontrías (she/her/hers/ella) is a Chicana/Xicana educator who lives with faith that a more loving and just world is possible. The beneficiary of generations of sacrifice and activism, her research examines the intersections between law, inequality, and the history of racial capitalism while centering abolitionist vision and praxis. Across a range of sites and generating empirical data, Hernández Escontrías's work considers how law and the legal profession construct and uphold settler-colonial projects across time.
Hernández Escontrías has published in the area of legal ethics, legal history, and Latines and the law. She is developing her Ph.D. dissertation into a book manuscript that examines how Black and Indigenous communities in Abya Yala/the Américas navigated Spanish colonial laws to challenge racial legal schema through their relationships with property and with one another. This manuscript draws from data collected during her archival and archaeological fieldwork in Perú from 2013-2015.
Prior to entering legal academia, Hernández Escontrías served as an inaugural law clerk to Judge Jennifer Sung of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Before that, she was an appellate defender with the California Appellate Project, representing indigent clients in their direct criminal appeals before a three-justice panel. She was a Research Social Scientist at the American Bar Foundation, and has taught courses at Northwestern University, Truman College of the City Colleges of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Occidental College.
Hernández Escontrías earned her JD from University of California, Irvine School of Law; her master's and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Northwestern University; a master of philosophy degree in archaeology from University of Cambridge in England; and a bachelor's degree in art and archaeology from Princeton University.
