Samuel V. Jones, PhD
Associate Dean for SCALES & Inclusive Excellence; Professor of Law
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Building & Room:
C-1060
Address:
300 S. State Street, Chicago, Illinois 60604
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About
Samuel V. Jones, PhD is an award-winning Professor of Law and Associate Dean at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law and one of Chicago’s leading public intellectuals on police conduct, sexual violence, and institutional justice. His scholarship challenges dominant legal paradigms surrounding victimhood and culpability, and he is the architect of the emerging “Virtue Contract” theory, which examines how moral narratives shape law, public policy, and the visibility of harm.
Dr. Jones serves as architect of the modern SCALES Program, UIC Law’s performance-based conditional admissions program widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading academic-success models for first-year law students. Although the SCALES pre-dated his tenure, in 2017, Dr. Jones executed a comprehensive operational redesign, rebuilding the curriculum, course syllabi, faculty selection and training models, grading architecture, instructional requirements, and operational framework. Drawing on educational psychology, military performance science and leadership models, he transformed SCALES into a data-driven, high-accountability academic training and assessment platform designed to produce elite outcomes among SCALES students.
Under his leadership, the program has achieved record-setting academic performance, persistence rates, and bar-readiness metrics, positioning it as a national model for performance-conditioned access to legal education. In 2021, Dr. Jones received the prestigious UIC Black History Maker Award for his SCALES achievements.
Following the merger that formed UIC John Marshall Law School, Dr. Jones authored the foundational recommendations memorandum and chaired the task force that led the national stakeholder-engagement process culminating in the school’s transition to its present identity as the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.
Dr. Jones earned his PhD from Kingston University London, his LLM, with recognition, from Columbia Law School, his JD, cum laude, from Texas Southern University, and his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Chaminade University of Honolulu.
Prior to joining UIC Law, Dr. Jones served 20 years in the U.S. military, retiring at the rank of Major. He also practiced commercial litigation at Hughes & Luce, LLP (now K&L Gates), one of the nation’s largest law firms. He later served as Senior Counsel at AT&T and as Corporate Counsel for Labor and Employment at Blockbuster, Inc., then the nation’s largest home entertainment company. Following his transition to academia, Dr. Jones became one of the first African American male professors in the law school’s 117-year history to attain the rank of Full Professor, the institution’s highest faculty rank, reflecting both scholarly impact and institutional leadership.
His scholarship has been cited in academic publications at institutions affiliated with Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown, and Berkeley, as well as by the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and the United Nations. He has served on the visiting residential faculty at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the University of Florida Levin College of Law and has presented his work at leading universities including Harvard and Oxford.
His selected honors and appointments include:
- Awarded the American Bar Association Taslitz-Raeder Award
- Named Faculty Advisor of the Year
- Awarded the UIC Black History Maker Award
- Awarded the Illinois Judicial Council Chairpersons Award for service as Special Advisor to the Chair
- Awarded the Cook County Bar Association Presidents Award for outstanding contributions to the profession
- Awarded the John Marshall Law School Faculty Scholarship Award for significant contributions to legal scholarship
- Named to the National Black Lawyers Top 100 Lawyers
- Appointed to the American Bar Association Human Trafficking Task Force, chaired by U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Kendall
- Appointed by the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County to a select committee to choose the next Superintendent of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center of Cook County
- Appointed to the Cook County Justice Advisory Council Board, chaired by Illinois Supreme Court Justice P. Scott Nevill
- Appointed multiple times to the faculty of the Illinois Supreme Court Judicial Education Conference, the mandatory continuing education program for Illinois judges
- Elected Co-Chair and Commissioner, Evanston Civilian Police Review Commission, overseeing civilian oversight of municipal policing practices.