Risa L. Goluboff

Risa Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century. She is the author of two major books on twentieth-century American legal and constitutional history: The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) and Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional, Change, and the Making ofthe1960s (2016), as well as the editor of Civil Rights Stories (with Myriam Gilles) 2008). Goluboff is also the author of numerous articles in legal and historical journals and book chapters in edited volumes, spanning the years from 1999 to the present.

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights won the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association for the best work in law and society that year, and the 2010 Biennial Coif Award for distinguished scholarship in law from the Association of American Law Schools. Vagrant Nation was supported by a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and a 2012 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. It received the American Historical Association’s 2017 Littleton-Griswold Prize, the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Award, the 2017 John Phillip Reid Book Award, and the 2016 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, among other honors.

She is a former Fulbright Scholar, and a former law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States. She is also a member of the American Law Institute.