Pedro Gerson spent more than a decade teaching and practicing law in the United States and Mexico before joining the Chicago-Kent College of Law faculty in fall 2024.
Gerson began his career in Mexico, where he was a project manager and attorney for Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad. There, he researched police practices and helped draft anti-corruption laws. Gerson also taught at Universidad Iberoamericana and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México before returning to the U.S.
In 2018 Gerson took up a post as an immigration staff attorney for the Bronx Defenders in New York, where he represented people fighting to stay in the U.S.
After two years working at the Bronx Defenders, he returned to teaching full-time, beginning at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Herbert Law Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he taught in the immigration law clinic for two years, which specialized in removal defense of immigrant detainees. He spent two years at California Western School of Law before taking a post at the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Pozen Center for Human Rights.
Education
J.D., University of Chicago Law School
M.P.P., University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
B.A., University of Pennsylvania
Publications
Decriminalizing Border Smuggling (work-in-progress)
Punitive Legal Immigration, Kentucky Law Journal (Forthcoming 2024)
Pressure to Detain: The Effect of Increasing Arrivals on Immigration Detention, Nebraska Law Review (Forthcoming 2024)
Decarceration to detention: The political economy of mass-incarceration in Louisiana, 146 Geoforum (2023) (with Jennifer Scott and Chelsey Wooten; Peer Reviewed).
Less is More?: Accountability for White-Collar Offenses Through an Abolitionist Framework, 1 Stetson Business Law Review 144 (2022).
Embracing Crimmigration to Curtail Immigration Detention, 12 UC Irvine Law Review 1209 (2022).
Crooked Politicians: Elusive Criminal Punishments and Paths to Accountability, 54 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 1013 (2021).
Immigration Detention as an Obstacle to Decarceration, 58 San Diego Law Review 535 (2021).
Return of the King: Corruption Backsliding in America, 3 International Comparative, Policy & Ethics Law Review 985 (2020).
La Trampa de la Corrupción en México, 15-3 Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica 20 (2015). (“Mexico’s Corruption Trap”).
Book Chapter: Entre la espada y la pared: Posibilidades migratorias para las y los menores en Estados Unidos, Forthcoming in El Acceso A La Justicia Para Niñas, Niños, Y Adolescentes En Contextos De Movilidad Internacional, Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (Nicolás Espejo Yaksic ed., 2021). (“Between a rock and a hard place: Migration possibilities for minors in the United States” in “Access to Justice for children and teenagers in international mobility contexts”)
Book Chapter: Coauthor. ¿Una ley para cada quién?: Cómo diseñar leyes más eficientes y
justas con herramientas tecnológicas, in Innovación Jurídica, Tirant lo Blanch (José Ramón Cossío Díaz ed., 2018). (“A law for each individual?: How to design more efficient and just laws with technological tools.”)
Presentations
“Asylum Policy of the Future,” work in progress, SEALS, July 2022
“(Un)protected: Children and Youth in U.S. Migration Law”, Mexican Supreme Court, July 2021
“Immigration Detention as an Obstacle to Decarceration,” SEALS, July 2020.
“Return of the King: Corruption Backsliding in America,” Law and Society Association Annual Meeting 2020.
“Immigration Detention as Policy, not Law,” SALT/LatCrit, October 2019.
“Immigration Detention: A Comparative Approach,” Southern Clinical Law Conference, October 2019.
“Corruption Traps in Mexico,” Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, April 2016.
“Best Practices for Selection of Judges,” Justice Commission of the Mexican Senate, November 2015.
Selected Popular Publications & White Papers
Monthly Columnist for Mexican online newspaper www.AnimalPolitico.com since March 2018
Menos castigo, Más Justicia, Letras Libres, July 1, 2023
The Ciudad Juarez Fire Is a Horrific Premonition of More to Come, Slate Magazine, March 29, 2023
The Biden Administration Is to Blame for the Horrific Deaths of 51 Migrants in Texas, Slate Magazine, June 29, 2022
The Big Problem with Addressing the “Root Causes” of Migration, Slate Magazine, April 28, 2021
Immigration is Not a “Crisis”, Slate Magazine, March 18, 2021
¿Invasión?, Periódico Reforma, May 19, 2019
La tecnología como factor de productividad y mejor gobierno en la función pública, Índice De Competitividad Internacional 2017, Nov. 2017. (“Technology as a productivity and better governance factor”).
Donald Trump has given the Mexican president the biggest gift he could wish for, The Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2017.
“Opening Government? The Case of Mexico in the Open Government Partnership,” In: Learning to Open Government, Transparency and Accountability Initiative (Florencia Guerzovich & Michael Moses eds., 2016)
La legalidad es un buen negocio, Índice De Competitividad Internacional 2015, Nov. 2017. (“Legality is good business”).
Impunidad: La desigualdad Fundamental en México, Este País, March 3, 2015 (“Impunity: The fundamental inequality in Mexico”).
Muchos Derechos Humanos y Pocas Nueces, Nexos, Jan. 15, 2015 (“Many Human Rights, not a lot of benefits”).