Professor Latisha Nixon-Jones’s Scholarship Connects Disaster Law, Equity, and Emerging Technology

Professor Latisha Nixon-Jones’s scholarship examines how legal frameworks can strengthen disaster response, particularly through public-private partnerships that support vulnerable populations. In her forthcoming Pepperdine Law Review article, Socio-legal Framework for Vulnerability: Using Public-Private Partnerships as a Tool for Disaster Management, she builds on her earlier work, Developing Resilience through Collaboration, to address a critical gap in disaster management: the lack of meaningful legal guidance. As she notes, even recent federal guidance offers only minimal direction—often reduced to “seek counsel in your jurisdiction.” Her work proposes a Socio-Legal Framework for Disaster Recovery that integrates stakeholder input and ensures private-sector involvement does not come at the expense of public safety. By examining the evolving role of privatization and the differing obligations of public and private actors, her scholarship argues that true resilience depends on the strength of legal safeguards in addition to physical infrastructure. 

Building on this foundation, Professor Nixon-Jones is developing a third piece that uses Hawai‘i as a case study following recent infrastructure failures, including a dam break on the north shore of O‘ahu and the wildfire in Maui. The project explores how public-private partnerships function in real-world disaster scenarios, offering a timely and practical lens on the legal complexities of response and recovery. By grounding her framework in lived events, she continues to advance a more comprehensive understanding of how law can shape effective and equitable disaster management.

In the classroom, Professor Nixon-Jones is also integrating artificial intelligence into skills-based legal education. Through exercises in negotiation, oral advocacy, and legal research, she encourages students to compare traditional methods with AI-assisted approaches, while developing their own professional judgment. By positioning students as both advocates and evaluators of emerging tools, her teaching emphasizes that technology should enhance, rather than replace, the core skills and identity of the modern lawyer. Professor Nixon-Jones says her goal is to “introduce AI in a way that allows students to develop their own professional tech identities.”