Dean Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law has been appointed to a federal committee that documents the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Joe Biden announced Goluboff’s appointment to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise on Friday.
According to a White House press release, the committee, within the Library of Congress, was established by Congress in 1955 after Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. bequeathed a portion of his estate to the United States in 1935. Congress used the gift to establish the committee, which is charged with documenting and disseminating the history of the court by publishing a series of volumes.
Composed of the librarian of Congress and four additional members appointed by the president for an eight-year term, the committee has published 11 volumes as of January 2022. UVA Law professor G. Edward White has also served as a member on the committee, and co-authored the third and fourth volumes, “The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-35.”
“This is a wonderful honor to accept — many historians I admire have worked on the project — and I look forward to helping to document the history of the Supreme Court through this important work,” Goluboff said.
Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the Law School. A renowned legal historian, her scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, especially their historical development in the 20th century. She is the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history at UVA.
She is the author of “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” which won the Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the James Willard Hurst Prize. Her second book, “Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s,” received the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the John Phillip Reid Book Award and the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, among other honors.
Goluboff is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Princeton University, her law degree from Yale and her undergraduate degree from Harvard University.
Goluboff hosts “Common Law,” a UVA Law School podcast.
Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.