Melissa Castro Wyatt

On the first day of Leslie Kendrick’s deanship at the University of Virginia School of Law this summer, she shared a photo of herself at age 2, holding her mother’s hand while traversing a rickety bridge on a dirt road outside her house in eastern Kentucky.

Kendrick walks home with her mother when she was a toddler in Kentucky.
Kendrick walks home with her mother when she was a toddler in Kentucky.

Kendrick would cross that bridge and many more in an illustrious academic and legal career that saw her become a Rhodes Scholar, a Supreme Court insider and now the hand guiding her alma mater.

“My sisters and I grew up in a place where we had tons and tons of extended family, and my father [a local lawyer] and mother [a writer and teacher] knew everybody in town and we were just part of a very tight-knit community,” Kendrick said. “Part of what drew me to UVA when I was a student was it felt like it was a real community—it felt like a place where you could put down roots.”

After graduating from the University of North Carolina as a Morehead Scholar and being named a Rhodes Scholar, she earned her master’s and Ph.D. in English literature from Oxford University, then enrolled at UVA Law in 2003 as a full-tuition Hardy Cross Dillard Scholar.

Kendrick’s UVA pedigree and her academic achievements opened the doors to two clerkships—for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III ’72 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Justice David Souter at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Through it all, people who know her say she remained grounded and retained common sense that her family, her hometown and her life experiences instilled in her.

Micah Schwartzman and Leslie Kendrick at Oxford
Kendrick with her future husband, Micah Schwartzman ’05, at Oxford University.

After her clerkships, Kendrick returned to the Law School to begin her teaching career in 2008, focused on free speech and tort law. Her doctoral dissertation on John Milton, an important early proponent of freedom of speech, offered a bridge to studying First Amendment law.

On July 1, she became the 13th dean to serve in the institution’s 205-year history, following in the path of her one-time professor and longtime mentor and personal friend, Risa Goluboff. Her selection comes as no surprise to those who knew her as a student, clerk and young professor.

Classmate and U.S. Attorney Chris Kavanaugh ’06 took classes alongside her and has remained a close friend, along with his spouse, Jasmine Yoon ’06, who was recently confirmed as a U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of Virginia.

“From the moment I met her in 2003 and in the 21 years since, she has always been a person of empathy, humility and intellect,” Kavanaugh said.

Wilkinson called her “one of the smartest, nicest clerks I ever had,” and someone who has “innate good judgment and a sense of fairness that touches everyone around her. She holds educational excellence and mutual supportiveness in equal balance.”

Those qualities served Kendrick well when, from 2017 to 2021, she served as vice dean under Goluboff during a period in which the Law School and its leaders had to face and adapt to unprecedented trials, including COVID-19.

“I relied on Leslie’s wise counsel, razor-sharp mind, and friendship throughout my deanship. She helped steer the Law School through the challenges of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence of Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, and the COVID pandemic,” Goluboff said while introducing Kendrick to UVA Law alumni at Reunions weekend. “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.”

Faculty and staff with Kendrick
Kendrick joins faculty and staff for ice cream on her first day in office. Photo by Julia Davis

Dayna Bowen Matthew ’87, dean of the George Washington University Law School, served on the UVA Law faculty during that time, and says she continues to emulate certain leadership skills and qualities she observed in Kendrick, whom Bowen called “a brilliant scholar, a gifted administrator and an incredible person with a strong moral compass.”

Leslie Kendrick works in a garden
The dean pitches in at the Public Interest Law Association’s Day of Service on Aug. 18. Photo by Jesús Pino

Matthew said she felt she was able to perform better as a scholar and as a teacher of controversial topics in constitutional law because Kendrick valued and protected academic freedom.

“Leslie said, ‘I think you ought to just let me handle [any complaints,] and you teach your course,’” Matthew said. “I will never forget that because it allowed me to focus on building a reputation based on my performance.”

Kendrick was “brilliant” as an administrator in many other ways, Matthew said, including her ability to spot young talent in the ranks of the legal academy while the two served on the Law School’s appointments committee together.

“Leslie was instrumental as a methodical analyst of the scholarship produced across the academy to help identify candidates suitable for UVA, and the faculty trusted the committee,” Matthew said. “When appointments are successful, it’s because the dean’s office is leading—and she and Risa did a fabulous job of hiring an unheard-of number of faculty members in a very short period of time.” (Goluboff hired roughly 20 professors in her first four years as dean.)

Before becoming dean, Kendrick served as faculty director of the school’s Center for the First Amendment. She has written or co-authored at least 22 articles, chapters or essays on free speech.

Leslie Kendrick talks with new students
At an orientation picnic, Kendrick talks with new students in Spies Garden. Photo by Julia Davis

She also served as a special adviser to the University’s provost regarding free expression and inquiry, and in 2021 chaired the committee that produced the University’s Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry, which was endorsed by President Jim Ryan ’92 and adopted by the Board of Visitors.

Kendrick is a member of the American Law Institute, serving as an adviser to the defamation and privacy portion of ALI’s “Restatement of the Law Third, Torts,” and is a co-author of the fifth and latest edition of a leading torts casebook, “Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress.” She has also written or co-authored several articles, chapters or essays on various aspects of tort law.

One of her co-authors on “Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress,” interim Dean John C. Goldberg of Harvard Law School, said he and his other co-authors had admired Kendrick’s scholarly work and asked her to join the project based on their interactions with her at workshops and conferences.

Kendrick speaks during orientation.
Kendrick speaks during orientation. Photo by Julia Davis

“Leslie brings to this project—as to everything she does—vast knowledge, analytical rigor, and an admirable instinct to ask, always, whether the law is living up to our professed commitments to equality, liberty and democracy,” Goldberg said. “She will bring all of these qualities to her [d]eanship, along with her abiding commitment to higher education and her thoughtful and effective approach to leadership.”

As Kendrick establishes herself at the helm of the Law School, she is focused on how to help the institution evolve into the future—how to adapt to the proliferation of artificial intelligence and other changes in technology—as well as how to prepare students for a changing legal profession and preserving the UVA Law community’s famous collegiality in a time of increased polarization.

She often compares the Law School’s community to a neighborhood and speaks of the responsibilities we have toward those neighbors. The big difference between our Law School neighbors and the neighbors we encounter later in life, she has said, is the boundaries we develop as we self-select for common interests and beliefs.

“Now, imagine you had lots of neighbors. And you not only all lived in close proximity, but you also all worked at the same place,” Kendrick recently told incoming first-year students at orientation. “Also, you socialize together constantly. Also, you were in the same book club that met for hours every week where you discuss the most explosive topics of the day. Also, even if you moved away, you would still see these same neighbors for the rest of your life in professional or personal circles.”

She acknowledged that “being part of a community this close and this layered” can be challenging.

Kendrick and colleagues at the Supreme Court
Kendrick and other UVA Law alumni traveled to the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 8 to hear Lackey v. Stinnie, a case Kendrick had worked on in the past in her private capacity as a lawyer. Brian Schmalzbach ’10, second from left, argued the case before the court. John Woolard ’17, far left; Jonathan Blank ’95 of McGuireWoods, third from left; Pat Levy-Lavelle ’05 of the Legal Aid Justice Center, fourth from left; and LAJC Executive Director Angela Ciolfi ’03, fourth from right, were part of the legal team. Photo by Favio Gonzalez

“So go easy on yourselves. Go easy on each other. Be kind to each other. Give each other the benefit of the doubt,” Kendrick told the newest UVA lawyers-in-making. “When you act, consider all of the relationships you have with your classmates—social, academic, professional—and remember that they’re your neighbors for the rest of your life.”

Robert Post, one of Kendrick’s fellow First Amendment scholars and a past dean of Yale Law School, noted that he sees in her scholarly work “certain characteristics” relevant to being a successful law school dean, from common sense to an appreciation of nuance and the complexity of human nature.

“[The deanship] requires someone who exercises superb judgment,” Post said. “That’s what she tends to do in her scholarship, that’s what I’ve seen her do in personal situations, and … that’s a dean all the way down to the ground, because you’re going to be facing controversies where people have important things to say on all sides, and you can never make everyone happy. But what you can do is recognize what’s most valuable from all sides, be as inclusive as possible, and yet take the right path.”

Harvard’s Goldberg, also reflecting on what it means to lead a law school, put it simply: “UVA Law School is in great hands.”

The GOAT Goes Viral

screenshot of Instagram

Kendrick’s advice to law students worrying about struggling to understand the material and wanting to “display competence” went viral on the American Bar Association’s Instagram and TikTok accounts, racking up more than 260,000 views.

“If you went to the gym and you didn’t break a sweat, you would be wasting your money,” she said at the ABA annual meeting in Chicago. “If you already knew how to be a lawyer, you wouldn’t need to go to law school. This is where you sweat. They’re worried about looking like a fool in cold calls? I say, ‘Look like a fool!’ Get up and do it again the next day—keep doing it. You’re going to get in front of a three-judge panel and you’re going to get beat up pretty bad, and guess what? You’re going to keep representing clients the next day. This is not a profession where success is perfection—success is resilience.”

The comments tell the story.

Erika Firestone: Her speech at the end of her Themis lectures saved me on a tough day of bar prep. ❤️

User1417800022998: Dean Kendrick was the best professor I ever had!!

peachy_____0000: I’m a nursing student and feel like this too and it’s [what I] needed to hear!!!

ameliaisaacs: queen

user4327148147459: Why am I crying?

lily_taylor: The GOAT 🔥

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