Annie Kim
Annie Kim directs the Program in Law and Public Service at the Law School. Before joining the teaching faculty full-time, she led the Mortimer Caplin Public Service Center as assistant dean for public service.
Prior to joining the Law School, Kim practiced for 12 years as a litigator and in-house counsel, representing Virginia school districts and local governments. Her 2012 victory in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of the school board in Republic Franklin Ins. Co. v. Albemarle County School Board secured a landmark ruling in the circuit protecting the rights of local governments against insurance companies seeking to avoid coverage under a wrongful act policy. Throughout her career, Kim practiced extensively in state and federal courts across Virginia, conducting two jury trials and numerous bench trials, arguing motions before trial courts throughout the Commonwealth, serving as counsel of record on appeals to the Virginia Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit. As a local government attorney in both Henrico and Albemarle counties, Kim also drafted numerous ordinances and policies affecting the public safety of citizens, including comprehensive legislation to create Albemarle’s first integrated professional and volunteer fire and rescue system. She continues to consult on legal matters for Virginia local government entities.
Kim has served in many leadership positions with the Virginia State Bar and the Local Government Attorneys of Virginia. She taught newly barred Virginia lawyers on the faculty of the state bar’s mandatory Justice Harry L. Carrico Professionalism Course, and has taught hundreds of local government attorneys, paralegals, school administrators and teachers, police officers and emergency communications workers on topics ranging from Fourth Amendment use of force and qualified immunity to legal ethics.
Kim has also taught and published extensively as a writer. Her first poetry collection, “Into the Cyclorama,” won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and her second book, “Eros, Unbroken,” won the 2019 Washington Poetry Prize and 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. Kim has taught graduate legal research and writing to LL.M. students at the Law School, legal writing to undergraduates at the UVA College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, poetry writing to undergraduates at Virginia Commonwealth University, and many writing seminars to community members throughout Charlottesville.