Risa Goluboff ’00 to Give Dean’s Lecture February 21

Risa Goluboff ’00, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, will give a lecture on February 21 on “Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.” Goluboff’s talk will be held in the Faculty Lounge at 4:30 p.m.

Goluboff is the 12th dean of the University of Virginia School of Law and the first woman to assume this role. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century.

Her lecture draws on her book Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s and looks at the changes in vagrancy laws in the middle of the last century.

“Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities and civil rights activists; gays, single women, and prostitutes,” said Golubuff. “As hundreds of these ‘vagrants’ and their lawyers challenged vagrancy laws in court, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom.”

The Supreme Court's 1972 decision declaring vagrancy laws unconstitutional continues to shape conflicts between police power and constitutional rights, including clashes over stop-and-frisk, homelessness, sexual freedom, and public protests.

Goluboff is also the author of The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard, 2007), which won the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize. She is co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of Civil Rights Stories (Foundation Press, 2008), and the author of numerous shorter works.

In 2008, Goluboff received the Law School’s Carl McFarland Award for excellence in faculty scholarship, and in 2011 the University of Virginia's All-University Teaching Award. Prior to joining the Law School in 2002, Goluboff clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. She also served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa.