Jonathan Simon is the Adrian Kragen Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. Simon teaches courses on criminal law, criminal justice, law and culture, risk and the law, and socio-legal studies. His scholarship concerns the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies, insurance and other contemporary practices of governing risk, the cultural lives of law, and the intellectual history of law and the social sciences. Simon collaborates with and is member of the faculty board of directors for the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice.

His most recent book is Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007), winner of the 2008 Book Prize of the Sociology of Law section of the ASA.