Mugambi Jouet

Mugambi Jouet is a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, where he joined in 2022. Previously, he taught at McGill University following a Grey Fellowship at Stanford Law School. His scholarly work focuses on American exceptionalism, criminal justice, and comparative history from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Jouet is the author of Exceptional America: What Divides Americans From the World and From Each Other (University of California Press, 2017), which examines the relationship between American exceptionalism and modern political polarization. His research has appeared in top journals including the American Journal of Comparative Law, American Journal of Legal History, and Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

In 2022, he received the Brophy Prize for groundbreaking work in American legal history, and in 2025, he was awarded the William A. Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award. His scholarship analyzes the death penalty, mass incarceration, juvenile justice, guns, abortion, and the historiography of key concepts from 'American exceptionalism' to the 'Western world.'

• Brophy Prize (2022)
• William A. Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award (2025)

Before academia, Professor Jouet represented indigent prisoners in Manhattan and the Bronx, served as a judicial clerk at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and worked as an assistant clinical law instructor at Sciences Po in Paris. A member of the New York bar, he is trilingual in English, French, and Spanish.