Leslie Kendrick

Leslie Kendrick is director of the Center for the First Amendment at UVA Law. Her scholarship and teaching focus on freedom of speech, torts and property law.

Kendrick’s work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, and Philosophy & Public Affairs, among other journals. She is co-authoring the fifth edition of the casebook Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, with John C. P. Goldberg, Anthony J. Sebok and Benjamin C. Zipursky.

Kendrick is a member of the American Law Institute. She is past chair of the AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems and a member of the Harvard Higher Education Forum. In 2017, she received the University of Virginia’s All-University Teaching Award.

A member of the Virginia State Bar, Kendrick serves on the executive committee of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association. She has recently litigated cases before the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Western District of Virginia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. 

Kendrick received a B.A. in classics and English as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her master’s and doctorate in English literature at the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. During law school at UVA, she was a Hardy Cross Dillard Scholar, served as essays development editor for the Virginia Law Review and received several academic awards, including the Margaret G. Hyde Award.

Before joining the faculty in 2008, Kendrick clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Justice David Hackett Souter of the Supreme Court of the United States. She has been a visiting professor at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School.

Scholarship Profile: A Fresh Look at the First Amendment (Virginia Journal 2016)