Harris Bio

Professor Angela P. Harris joined the UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) faculty in 2011. She began her career at the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1989, and has been a visiting professor at the law schools of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. In 2010-11, at the State University of New York - University at Buffalo School of Law, she served as vice dean of research and faculty development. She writes widely in the field of critical legal theory, examining how law sometimes reinforces and sometimes challenges subordination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other dimensions of power and identity. Her writings have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages, from Portuguese to Korean.

Professor Harris taught the first seminar on environmental justice at Berkeley Law, continues to teach environmental justice at King Hall, is well known for as the author of a number of widely reprinted and influential articles and essays in critical legal theory, and has coauthored numerous casebooks, including, notably, Race and Races: Cases and Materials for a Diverse America; Gender and Law; and Economic Justice.

Among other awards for her mentorship of students and junior faculty, she received the 2008 Clyde Ferguson Award from the Minority Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Harris is a frequent and sought-after speaker at workshops and conferences, and she is active in promoting community among critical legal scholars in legal academia and beyond. She played an active role in founding LatCrit, Inc. and ClassCrits, two organizations that regularly host conferences and publish symposia for legal academics and others writing from a critical perspective on issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. She was also a founder of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law. At King Hall, she founded the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies, a student-faculty initiative that promotes scholarship, teaching and learning, and public conversation on issues of race and ethnicity at the law school and beyond.