Professor Winkler is a specialist in constitutional law, the Supreme Court, and gun policy. His book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the ABA Silver Gavel Award, and received the Scribes Book Award. He is also the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, which did not win any awards but was once the subject of a question on Jeopardy!. He is one of the twenty most cited active legal scholars in judicial opinions, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Atlantic, Slate, and the New Republic. Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, he clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced law in Los Angeles. 

Professor Winkler is the 2021-2022 Carl F. Cranor Family Visiting Scholar.