Professor Risa L. Goluboff
Charlottesville, VA
University of Virginia School of Law
Harvard University
Yale Law School
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.
Goluboff is the author of The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard, 2007), which won the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize. Her second book, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford, 2016) 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 and the 2017 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, among other honors. Goluboff is also co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of Civil Rights Stories (Foundation Press, 2008), and the author of numerous shorter works.
Goluboff has been quoted or cited by The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic and more, and she has appeared on PBS documentaries and the popular radio podcast “BackStory.” Her commentaries frequently appear in Slate.
In 2008, Goluboff received the Law School’s Carl McFarland Award for excellence in faculty scholarship, and in 2011 the University of Virginia's All-University Teaching Award. She is an affiliated scholar at the Miller Center and a faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. In 2012, Goluboff was named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. From 2011 to 2016, she directed the University’s J.D.-M.A. in History Program. Goluboff has served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Chicago and New York University law schools.
Prior to joining the Law School in 2002, Goluboff clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. She also served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa.
