Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Law and Society
Ph.D., J.D., SUNY at Buffalo
(949) 824-1463
jwmeeker@uci.edu
2357 Social Ecology II
Department:
Criminology, Law and Society
Specializations:
sociology of law, criminal justice, research methodology, statistics
James W. Meeker received his J.D. and Ph.D. in sociology from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is Professor Emeritus in the department of Criminology, Law and Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
He currently is a commissioner on the California Legal Services Trust Fund Commission and the California Commission on Access to Justice. From 1989 to 2020 he served on the board of directors for the Public Law Center of Orange County. He was the associate dean of students and computing for the School of Social Ecology from 1999 to 2014. From 1995 to 2001 he was the Director of the Orange County Gang Incident Tracking System, a cooperative effort between UCI and the Orange County Chief’s & Sheriff Association, tracking gang crime in Orange County. His research interests include the sociology of law, criminology and applied research methodology and statistics with particular emphasis on policy analysis. He has worked on Geographic Information Systems and the application of this technology to the analysis of gang incidents in Orange County. More recently, he has applied this technology to the analysis of legal needs in the poverty community and the delivery of legal services by legal aid organizations. He has published in the areas of gangs, procedural justice, access to justice for the poor, legal services delivery mechanisms, domestic violence and the impact of criminological research on policy, and prosecutorial strategies against organized crime.