Leslie Kendrick

White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs
Director, Center for the First Amendment

Biography
Publications
Courses
Media

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)

Education

J.D.
University of Virginia School of Law
2006
D.Phil.
University of Oxford
2003
M.Phil.
University of Oxford
2000
B.A.
University of North Carolina
1998

“Culpability and Negligence,” Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press) (forthcoming).

“Must Free Speech Be Harmful?” U. Chi. L. Forum (forthcoming).

"Miami Herald v. Tornillo: Freedom of Speech for Whom?” Painting Constitutional Law (forthcoming).
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“Lies and Free Speech Values,” 38 L. & Phil. 495 (2019).

“The Book Has Two Faces: Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 6 Critical Analysis of Law 174 (2019).
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“There’s No Such Thing as Affirmative Duty” (with Kenneth S. Abraham), 104 Iowa L. Rev. 1649 (2019).
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“On Clear and Present Danger,” 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1653 (2019) (symposium).

“A Shifting Star: Compelled Speech and Anti-Discrimination Laws,” 13 FIU L. Rev. 729 (2019) (symposium).

“The Etiquette of Animus,” (with Micah Schwartzman) 132 Harv. L. Rev. 133 (2018).
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“Another First Amendment,” 118 Colum. L. Rev. 2095 (2018).

“The Answers and the Questions in First Amendment Law,” in Louis P. Nelson & Claudrena N. Harold eds., Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity 70 (University of Virginia Press, 2018).

“Use Your Words: On the ‘Speech’ in ’Freedom of Speech,’” 116 Mich. L. Rev. 667 (2018).
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“Are Speech Rights for Speakers?,” 103 Va. L. Rev. 1767 (2017).
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“Free Speech as a Special Right,” 45 Philosophy & Public Affairs 87 (2017).
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“Foreword: Tort Law as a Regulatory Tool,” 10 J. Tort L. 1 (2017).

“A House Divided Against Itself: Unstable Nobility in 'A Woman Killed With Kindness,’” 64 Notes & Queries 388 (2017).

“How Much Does Speech Matter?,” 129 Harv. L. Rev. 997 (2016) (reviewing Seana Shiffrin, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (2014)).
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“Brandeis, Speech, and Money,” in Daniel Terris & David J. Weinstein, eds., Louis D. Brandeis, Then and Now: Essays from Brandeis University’s Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court 183 (Brandeis University, 2016).

“First Amendment Expansionism,” 56 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1199 (2015) (symposium).
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“Free Speech and Guilty Minds,” 114 Colum. L. Rev. 1255 (2014).
Article

“Nonsense on Sidewalks: Content Discrimination in McCullen v. Coakley,” 2014 Sup. Ct. Rev. 215.

“Speech, Intent, and the Chilling Effect,” 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1633 (2013).
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“Disclosure and Its Discontents,” 27 J. L. & Pol. 575 (2012).
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“Content Discrimination Revisited,” 98 Va. L. Rev. 231 (2012).
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“Content Neutrality and Compelling Interests: The October 2010 Term,” 98 Va. L. Rev. in Brief 14 (2012).
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“The Lockean Rights of Bequest and Inheritance,” 17 Legal Theory 145 (2011).
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“FDA's Regulation of Prescription Drug Labeling: A Role for Implied Preemption,” 62 Food & Drug L. J. 227 (2007).
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“A Test for Criminally Instructional Speech,” 91 Va. L. Rev. 1973 (2005).
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