Richard C. Schragger
Rich Schragger joined the Virginia faculty in 2001 and was named the Walter L. Brown Professor in 2022. He was previously the Perre Bowen Professor, a chair he held starting in 2013. Schragger’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy, and the constitutional and economic status of cities. He also writes about law and religion. He has authored articles on the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, the role of cities in a federal system, local recognition of same-sex marriage, takings law and economic development, and the history of the anti-chain store movement. Schragger has published in the Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Virginia and Michigan law reviews, among others. He teaches property, local government law, urban law and policy, and church and state. He serves as director of the Program in Law, Communities and the Environment (PLACE), along with Cale Jaffe.
Schragger received an M.A. in legal theory from University College London and received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. He was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Dolores Sloviter, then-chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Schragger joined the Washington, D.C., firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, where he practiced for two years.
Schragger has been a visiting professor at the University of Münster, Tel Aviv University, the University of Chicago School of Law, the New York University School of Law, the Georgetown University Law Center and the Quinnipiac School of Law, and has been the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School. He is a faculty fellow at the Miller Center, a faculty adviser to the Local Solutions Support Center, and a member of the American Law Institute. He is the author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (Oxford University Press, 2016).
It is commonly assumed that local land use regulations—and especially single-family and other restrictive zoning classifications—limit housing supply...
Cities have been largely absent from the theory and legal doctrine of federalism, especially in the United States, where federalism is understood to...
In the last few years, the Supreme Court has upended its doctrine of religious freedom under the First Amendment. The Court has explicitly rejected...