Risa Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century. 

Goluboff is 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. Her second book, "Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s" (Oxford, 2016) was supported by a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and a 2012 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. It received the American Historical Association’s 2017 Littleton-Griswold Prize, the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Award, the 2017 John Phillip Reid Book Award and the 2016 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, among other honors. Goluboff is also co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of "Civil Rights Stories" (Foundation Press, 2008), and the author of numerous shorter works. 

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute. In 2008, she 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. Goluboff also holds appointments as professor of history in the Corcoran Department of History, faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center.  

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 holds degrees from Harvard (A.B.), Princeton (M.A., Ph.D.), and Yale (J.D.) and served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa.  

After the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, Goluboff led the University-wide committee charged with recovering from and responding to the events.