A Tribute to Dean Risa Goluboff

RISA GOLUBOFF: It is now my honor to introduce the Law School's next 13th Dean, Leslie Kendrick, of the class 2006. And we are going to clap before I tell them about.

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Leslie, I say introduce, but I know some of you have had her as a professor. Some of you have met her in other contexts. Leslie is a member of the class of 2006, and she has been a member of our Faculty since 2008 and was my vice Dean from 2017 to 2021. If you think about those dates, I'm going to come back to that.

For those of you who have not yet met Leslie, prepare to be impressed. Not just by her stellar credentials, which I will discuss first, but also by her character, her experience, and her devotion to this place.

Leslie Kendrick is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor of Law here at the University of Virginia School of Law. Leslie is that rare scholar with deep expertise and a national reputation in two different fields, tort law and freedom of speech. She has written dozens of articles and book chapters in these areas, and she is the co-author of the fifth edition of Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, one of the country's leading tort law casebooks.

Leslie also directs the Law School's Center for the First Amendment. As I was saying, and she has followed in the tradition of Law School Faculty, offering up her expertise in service to the University as a special advisor to the Provost on free expression and free inquiry. And she also chaired the University committee that drafted the University Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry in 2021.

Leslie has also given generously of her talents as a member of the Larger Legal Community and the Public. She is a member of the American Law institute, serving as an advisor to the defamation and privacy portion of the ALI's Third Restatement of Torts. She is also a member of the Virginia State Bar and the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference and has served on the executive committee of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association.

Leslie has been involved in pro bono litigation before the US District court for the Western District of Virginia and the Fourth Circuit, and also argued a major tort law case before the Supreme Court of Virginia. Leslie is a Phi Beta KAPPA graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She earned her master's degree and doctorate in English literature at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

After we recruited her to the law school as a Hardy Cross Dillard scholar, just so you know, these are all the biggest scholarships one can get. I think you know that, but I just want to point it out. Leslie dove into the life of the Law School. Among other things, she served as an essays development editor for the Virginia Law Review and as one of my very first research assistants. I know that is not like a top-line thing on her resume for her, but I was a new faculty member, and Leslie was a graduating third-year student, and boy, was I lucky to have her as my research assistant.

For her incredible contributions as a law student, Leslie won the Margaret G. Hyde Award at graduation, which is the highest honor bestowed by the faculty by a vote of the faculty on a graduating student. Again, tippy top. Then she served as a law clerk to Fourth Circuit Judge and UVA Law School alum J. Harvie Wilkinson of the class of '72 and then Supreme Court Justice David Souter. I'm just going to do this from now on.

Our faculty was thrilled when we were able to recruit Leslie and her husband, Michael Schwarzman of the class of '05, back to Charlottesville to teach, where they have been treasured colleagues, professors, mentors, and friends since 2008.

Leslie is a true triple threat on this faculty. She excels at teaching, she is a beloved teacher, and won UVA's all University Teaching Award. She is an amazing scholar, as I have told you. She also won the Law School's Carl MacFarlane Prize for Outstanding Research by a Junior Faculty Member. And she has been key to my leadership and the administration of this law school throughout her time here, and especially during her time as my vice dean.

As to the last, I relied on Leslie's wise counsel, razor-sharp mind, and friendship throughout my deanship, especially in those four years. She helped steer the law school through the challenges of the White supremacist and neo-Nazi violence of August 11 and 12, 2017, and the COVID pandemic. Where she was the primary academic officer who led our efforts to move operations online in eight days, in the spring of 2020 and then into a hybrid format for the following school year. There is no one I would rather be in a foxhole with than Leslie Kendrick.

Leslie was also my partner in many happier things, like the law school's world famous hiring spree during the COVID years when we hired 22 faculty in three years. I mean it world-famous, you can check the Twittersphere. And in helping us establish 13 new centers of Faculty Excellence and so much else.

What luck for me and for the law school and for all of us that Leslie was giving-- willing to give so much of herself to this school as vice Dean and that she is willing to do it again, now, as Dean. I imagine that you have already come to the same conclusion I have by this point, Leslie is exactly the right person to lead this Law School.

She is a brilliant scholar and beloved teacher, a compassionate, pragmatic, hardworking, and innovative leader. And she is someone who knows this place as a student and an alumna and a faculty member and vice Dean. And she shares the same values that have animated all of our deans, a love of this institution, and its people.

I know that Leslie will be an extraordinary Dean for the Law School. I know that she will love getting to know you and working with you as I have, and that I know that you will love her as I do.

So without further ado, I present to you our incoming 13th Dean of UVA Law School, Leslie Kendrick.

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LESLIE KENDRICK: Good morning. I'm so glad to be with you. Thank you so, so much for the warm welcome. And Risa, thank you for that kind introduction, which I will remember for the rest of my life. It means more to me than I can say. I want to thank-- Thank you. Maybe I'll move the podium up a little bit to.

These were one of our COVID purchases. I helped give input to this and now we're using it. I'm excited about it. Is that better? Wonderful, wonderful. So I want to thank Becca Nelson and everyone else at the foundation who made this whole weekend possible. It is an amazing weekend every year, and we're so grateful. And thank you, Eric and Lou, for inviting me to be part of today's program.

Now, as Risa said, I'm Leslie Kendrick. I'm a proud member of the UVA Law class of 2006. I've had the good fortune to be a member of the Faculty for the past 16 years, and I can't tell you how glad and how honored I am that I will be becoming the Dean of the law school on July 1 of this summer.

I look forward to spending time with all of you in the coming years, but for now, I'm going to stick to my assignment. I'm here to pay tribute to the incomparable Risa Goluboff.

As Risa mentioned, I've known her since I was in Law School. I was her research assistant as a third year, but the first time I ever laid eyes on Risa, the first time I ever met her, I was a 1L law student sitting in the Office of my small section contracts Professor, Tom Nachbar, who many of you know and love. And Risa stopped by Tom's office to say hello with her and [? Rich's ?] new baby, their oldest child, Ellie, who's now a sophomore in college.

Little did I know then, as a nervous one, cramming for my exams, that this place and this person would become such a significant part of my life. I then was one of research-- research assistants as she finished her award-winning book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. And since then she has been my boss and my mentor, my colleague, and my friend. The Shirley to my Laverne. Or maybe I'm the Laverne to her Shirley. And I know a lot of you have been around long enough to get that reference, because I have too.

I had a special perspective on Risa's deanship. For four years as the vice dean, I had a front-row seat, and at other times, I was far from the action, living a placid life because she was working hard every day to make sure the rest of us could do what we came here for. To do research and teach the most wonderful law students in the country.

So I have two very different perspectives. And from both, Risa made it look easy. And it isn't. I know it isn't, but she made it look easy every day. So I want to take just a few moments to tell you all and to tell Risa, what an incredible person she is and what an impact she's made on this institution.

First, there's Risa the scholar. Risa is a renowned legal historian who's made the law school her home for more than two decades, which is the entirety of her legal career. She's an academic-- She's an expert on constitutional law and civil rights history. She's written two award-winning books on civil rights history, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights and Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change and the Making of the 1960s. And she won the Law School's Carl MacFarlane prize for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship.

Next, there's Risa the teacher. She also won the university's-- all University Teaching Award in 2011, described by one former student as a professor on a relentless quest for class participation. She's known across generations of students, both for fostering thoughtful classroom discussion and for her incisive and brilliant lectures.

As another former student once put it, a class with Risa Goluboff is so much more than a class. It's a true discourse and intellectual adventure and a downright deep experience. And if Risa is an extraordinary scholar and teacher, she has been an equally extraordinary dean.

As the law school's 12th and its first woman and first Jewish dean, Risa presided over the hiring of 36 new faculty members, a generational restocking of talent, established 13 new academic centers, and recruited incoming classes, as you've heard, that are both the most diverse and the most highly credentialed in the law school's history.

Meanwhile, employment outcomes for our private practice, public service, and clerkship offices have been superb. As Risa mentioned, the class of 2023 employment numbers are the best we've ever seen among the top five in the country in every category that we track.

Risa has also worked to make both legal services and the legal profession more accessible. She added or revived 10 additional clinics for a total of 24 law school clinics that serve clients across the country and the Commonwealth, as well as providing practice experience for our students.

She vastly expanded support for careers in public service, including she raised the amount of public service summer grants, and she guaranteed funding to any law student working in public service for the summer. She created full-tuition public service scholarships, and she expanded the law school's Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program so that all students working in legal positions paying less than $100,000 are eligible for assistance.

Risa also spearheaded the law school's roadmap scholars initiative, which she described to you as her brainchild, and she led it. As you know, a two-year pipeline program for first-generation and low-income college students.

Risa did all of this through your generous support and that of our fellow alumni. She oversaw a capital campaign that, thanks to your generous support, achieved its $400 million goal 15 months ahead of schedule. And during her deanship, the law school's endowment grew more than 75% to $845.7 million.

In all of these ways, Risa built on the excellence of this institution to make it even stronger than it was before. And she did so while leading wisely and gracefully through some of the most momentous events of our times. Only one year into her deanship, she chaired the Deans Working Group for Recovery and Response to August 11 and 12, leading the university's response to the White supremacist violence that occurred in Charlottesville in 2017.

Over eight years, she has led the law school through the George Floyd protests and a national reckoning with race and racism, through multiple national elections and international conflicts and through a global pandemic. She's been a true Steward with a steady hand.

Somehow, she found additional time to serve on boards and committees for the [? Carche ?] institute, the Miller center, the American Association of law schools, equal justice works, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. I get tired just reading the list. I don't know how you do all of it.

And she holds a presidential appointment to the United States Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes. Devise, an entity that documents and disseminates the history of the Supreme Court of the United States.

That Risa Goluboff is brilliant, energetic, and accomplished. Perhaps goes without saying if you look at her CV. But more difficult to capture, is the humanity, generosity of spirit, and optimism that she brings to her work, to her colleagues, and to her students every day. She cares deeply about this institution and everyone who is a part of it.

She is a generous mentor to students, scholars, and fellow leaders. She listens hard before she speaks, she's the first to dig into a thorny problem, and she's the last to take credit for the solution. She enables others to do their best work and inspires us with her best.

I brought my phone up here because Risa has been on speed dial on my phone since the day I became vice dean, and we have worked together in the law school. We have pictures of us working on Risa's deck outside at six feet distance during the COVID pandemic.

We've worked over the phone. We've worked while she's on the road visiting some of you out across the country. We've worked day and night together, and whether it's by phone or in person at all hours of the day or night, through some leisurely conversations and some less. So no matter what, Risa is the same positive, upbeat person you all know and love. And getting off the phone, often, she would say, you're the best. And you actually just said it just now, as we got a hug from each other. You're the best. And I just want to say you're the best. You're the best.

We have been so lucky to have you pilot the law school for the last eight years. You and Rich are both anchors of our community. We will miss you next year while you're away on sabbatical, and we look forward to welcoming you back to the faculty in fall 2025.

Risa learned earlier in the week, but I'll repeat it for you in this moment. In a fitting tribute, the law school alum, alumni, that's all of you have donated more than $5 million to establish a distinguished chair in Risa's honor, the Risa Goluboff Distinguished Professorship.

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Risa, your legacy will always be part of this law school in so many ways, and we are thrilled to have that legacy honored through this chair and to be able to thank you here and now for all you have done for this place that we all love. Thank you.

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