Professor Rose Cuison-Villazor

Rose Cuison-Villazor is Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers Law School where she previously served as Interim Co-Dean (2021-2023) and Vice Dean (2019-2021). Professor Cuison-Villazor is also Director of the Center for Immigration Law, Policy, and Social Justice, which conducts publicly engaged research and policy work on behalf of noncitizens and their families. She previously taught at the University of California, Davis School of Law, Hofstra Law School, and Southern Methodist University School of Law. 

Professor Cuison-Villazor’s overall research agenda examines laws, policies, and norms that determine membership and belonging. She teaches and writes in the areas of immigration and citizenship law, property law, critical race theory, Asian Americans and the law, U.S. territorial law, and equal protection law.  

Professor Cuison-Villazor’s scholarship has appeared or will appear in top law journals in the country, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, Minnesota Law Review, New York University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and University of California Davis Law Review. Her recent piece, Rejecting Citizenship, 120 Mich. L. Rev. 1033 (2022), challenges the conventional view of citizenship as a means of inclusion and equality and shows how citizenship has served as a tool of oppression and subordination.

Her recent books include Race and Races, Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (4th Ed.) (with Juan Perea, Richard Delgado, and Osamudia James) (2022) and Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Social Identity (with Al Brophy and Kali Murray) (forthcoming 2023).

Professor Cuison-Villazor graduated cum laude from the American University Washington College of Law in 2000. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Stephen H. Glickman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. She then received an Equal Justice Works Fellowship to work with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) to represent immigrants who faced discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. She received a Human Rights Fellowship from Columbia Law School where she earned an LL.M. in 2006.