Goluboff Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

University of Virginia School of Law Dean Risa Goluboff, a nationally renowned legal historian, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The academy, which announced its 2018 fellows today, is an honorary society founded in 1780 that recognizes achievement in the natural sciences, social sciences, law, arts and humanities. Its 4,900 fellows convene to address global challenges.

Goluboff, who became the first female dean of UVA Law in 2016, is also the first woman on the faculty to be elected to the academy. She is among four people elected this year under the law category, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Her scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century. She holds appointments as professor of history in the Corcoran Department of History, faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2017.

“It’s a privilege to be elected to the academy and to join such an esteemed group of scholars,” Goluboff said. “I’m deeply honored. I’m also thankful for the support the Law School and UVA have given me over the years, which has been critical to my growth as a legal historian and scholar.”

Goluboff is the author of “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” 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,” 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. Goluboff is also co-editor, with Myriam Gilles, of “Civil Rights Stories,” and the author of numerous shorter works.

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. 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.

After the protests in Charlottesville on Aug. 11-12, UVA President Teresa Sullivan appointed Goluboff to chair a working group of deans and community members to lead the University’s response.

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.

Goluboff earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, her J.D. from Yale Law School and her A.B. from Harvard University.

Seven other UVA Law professors are academy fellows:

• Kenneth S. Abraham
• John C. Jeffries Jr.
• Douglas Laycock
• Paul G. Mahoney
• John T. Monahan
• Frederick Schauer
• G. Edward White

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony Oct. 6 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.