Ira Ellman’s current scholarly projects include an empirical investigation into how people make judgments about appropriate legal rules, and a book for Oxford University Press about the difficulties inherent in implementing family policy through family law. He is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Child and Youth Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Ellman was Chief Reporter for the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, and is senior author of a leading text on family law. Before joining the College faculty, he served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a legislative aide to Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, and a consultant to the California legislature. He has visited at Hastings College of Law, Brooklyn Law School, the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the Earl Warren Institute, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, at U.C. Berkeley. Professor Ellman has served on many legislative and judicial committees in Arizona concerned with family law and policy, currently, the Arizona Child Support Guidelines Committee. He has also written on health care law and was a founding member of the Bioethics Committee of Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix.