Dr. Fradella's area of specialization is the social scientific study of courts and law. This includes research and teaching on the historical development of substantive, procedural, and evidentiary criminal law (including courtroom acceptability of forensic and social scientific evidence, especially forensic psychological/psychiatric testimony); evaluation of law's effects on human behavior; the dynamics of legal decision-making; and the nature, sources, and consequences of variations and changes in legal institutions or processes.
Dr. Fradella is the author or co-author of eleven books, including Punishing Poverty: How Bail and Pretrial Detention Fuel Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System (University of California Press); Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Police Tactic (New York University Press); Sex, Sexuality, Law, and (In)Justice (Routledge); Mental Illness and Crime (Sage); The Foundations of Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press); Defenses of Excuse in American Law (Academica); a casebook on criminal law (Oxford University Press); and four textbooks published by the Wadsworth Division of Cengage Learning. Dr. Fradella has also authored or co-authored more than 90 articles, book chapters, reviews, encyclopedia entries, op-eds, and scholarly commentaries. His work has appeared in outlets such as the American Journal of Criminal Law; Criminal Justice Policy Review; Criminal Law Bulletin; Criminology and Public Policy; Federal Courts Law Review; Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice; Journal of Criminal Justice Education; Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law; Journal of Law and Sexuality; Justice Systems Journal; Prison Journal; Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; Cardozo Public Law, Policy, and Ethics Journal; Criminal Justice Studies; Journal of Homosexuality; Law and Psychology Review; Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice; and the law reviews of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill); Pepperdine University; Rutgers University; the University of Florida; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the City University of New York. In addition, he has delivered more than a dozen invited lectures and roughly sixty conference presentations. In addition to serving a three-year term as the editor of the Western Society of Criminology’s official journal, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society (2013–2016) he has also guest-edited three different issues of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice (2002, 2011, 2020) and an issue of Criminal Justice Studies. In 2019, Dr. Fradella became the Editor-in-Chief of Thomson/Reuters' law journal, the Criminal Law Bulletin, and he continues to serve in that capacity.
Prior to entering academe, Dr. Fradella worked as an autopsy technician in the Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner of Washington, DC; practiced law with a large firm and as a
sole-practitioner; and worked in the federal courts system as a judicial
law clerk for the U.S. District Court for
the District of Arizona. He then spent
10 years holding faculty appointments of increasing rank at The College of New
Jersey before becoming a professor in and chairperson of the Department of
Criminal Justice at California State University, Long Beach. That university selected him as the 2014
award recipient for Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity. In
August of 2014, Dr. Fradella became a Professor in and Associate Director of
the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University,
where he also holds affiliate appointments as a Professor of Law in the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and as a core
faculty member in the interdisciplinary program in law and psychology.
After his selection as a Fellow of the Western
Society of Criminology (WSC) in 2009, Dr. Fradella served as the Society’s
vice-president in 2011; its president in 2012; and its executive director from
2016 to the present. Dr. Fradella
received the WSC’s Joseph D. Lohman award in 2014 for his professional service
and was honored with the Richard Tewksbury Award for scholarship and activism
on the intersection of crime and sexuality in 2017. Dr. Fradella is also a
member of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice
Sciences, the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Association,
the American Psychology and Law Association, the State Bar of Arizona, Alpha
Phi Sigma, and Phi Beta Kappa.