Professor Wins Statewide Outstanding Faculty Award

University of Virginia School of Law professor Rachel Harmon has been named a recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Faculty Award, sponsored by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and Dominion Energy.

The awards, announced Tuesday, recognize faculty at Virginia’s institutions of higher learning who exemplify the highest standards of teaching, scholarship and service. The 12 winners will be recognized at a ceremony March 7 in Richmond. UVA biology professor Amanda K. Gibson also will receive the award.

The University’s nomination said of Harmon, “Although her classes deal with difficult questions about race, crime, policing, and violence, Professor Harmon uses a rare blend of professional experience, academic mastery, and emotional intelligence to ensure that students with diverse perspectives engage each other with rigor and respect.”

Harmon is the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law, Class of 1957 Research Professor of Law and director of the Law School’s Center for Criminal Justice.

A leading scholar on policing and the laws that regulate police behavior, Harmon joined the faculty in 2006 after spending eight years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Her 2021 casebook, “The Law of the Police,” is the first resource for students and others seeking to understand and evaluate how American law governs police interactions with the public. She was a recipient of one of this year’s All-University Teaching Awards.

Students and colleagues have praised Harmon for creating a respectful space for exchanging ideas about challenging topics.

“She encourages everyone to speak up,” Dean Risa Goluboff wrote about Harmon. “Students from across the ideological spectrum flock to her courses and gush about her thoughtful and evenhanded approach.”

Her teaching methods, long office hours and willingness to share life advice have had an impact on multiple students beyond law school, including some who have gone into law enforcement.

Juhi Desai ’23, president of the Student Bar Association, called Harmon a “dynamic, brilliant and innovative” educator.

“Through thoughtful and rigorous questioning, she forces her students to think deeper and more critically about their ideas; as a result, she develops our minds and makes us better lawyers and advocates for justice,” Desai wrote in support of the nomination.

Harmon is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as an associate reporter for ALI’s project on Principles of the Law of Policing. She advises nonprofits and government actors on issues of policing and the law, and in the fall of 2017, served as an expert for the “Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Current University President Jim Ryan ’92 was the last UVA law professor to win the award, in 2011.

She earned her B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two M.Sc. degrees from the London School of Economics as a Marshall Scholar and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court.