January 2016
Superior Court Judge Maria D. Hernandez '86 presides over efforts to keep troubled juveniles from succumbing to lives of crime. She recently spoke to UCI News about her experience as an Undergrad student. "The exposure I had at UCI opened my views, my perspectives, on the world," she says. "The work that I saw being done by researchers and my professors in the 1980s was really forward-thinking. Henry Pontell, Paul Jesilow, Bill Thompson – they really shaped what I wanted to do in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. [I learned about] some of the racial inequities and deficiencies in our criminal justice system. It’s a great system, but it has room for improvement, and I wanted to make it better. I wanted it to be more fair and objective."
You can read the full article here.
Photo credit: Steve Zylius/UCI