Dean Sally Brown Richardson

Sally Brown Richardson specializes in property law, community property law and comparative private law at Tulane University Law School. Her scholarship and teaching focus on how property and community property doctrines might be modernized to operate more effectively and efficiently given changes in society since their creation. In doing so, she compares how property and community property doctrines operate in both common and civil law jurisdictions, and she considers what the different legal systems might learn from each other to better address modern property issues.

Richardson in 2019 received Tulane University’s highest teaching honor, the President’s Award for Excellence in Professional and Graduate Teaching. In 2015, she was awarded the Felix Frankfurter Award for Distinguished Teaching, Tulane Law School's highest teaching honor. And in 2015-16, she was the Gordon Gamm Faculty Scholar, an award supporting early-career professors.

Her work has been published in the American Journal of Comparative Law, University of Houston Law Review, Tennessee Law Review, Tulane Law Review and the Louisiana Law Review. She is the author of the textbook Community Property in the United States (Carolina Academic Press 2015). Her article "Reframing Ameliorative Waste" was selected for the 2015 Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum. Richardson also blogs regularly for the PropertyProf Blog.

Richardson is the Reporter for the Uniform Law Commissions's project on default rules for tenancies in common.  She serves on the executive board for both the Association of Law, Property and Society and the American Society of Comparative Law.  She also is an active member of the Louisiana State Law Institute, serving on its Council and a number of committees, including the Water Law Committee, Persons-Marriage Committee and Tax Sales Committee. Before joining the Tulane Law faculty in 2012, Richardson practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C. She clerked for Judge W. Eugene Davis on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and before that worked as deputy communications director for then-U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu.