Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law and the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and Democracy, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century. He is also a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, he was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.

His recent books explore how innovative legal mobilization produces transformative social change. Among the publications he has authored or co-authored are the forthcoming Lawyers and Movements: Legal Mobilization in Transformative Times; Making Public Interest Lawyers in a Time of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach; and the first public interest law textbook, Public Interest Lawyering: A Contemporary Perspective.

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