Leti Volpp

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice and director of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2005. She researches immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on how law is shaped by ideas about culture and identity.

Her most recent publications include “Passports in the Time of Trump” in Symploke (2018), “Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship” in the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017), “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law (2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), and “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015). She is the editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles.

Volpp’s honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award, and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award. She has delivered many public lectures, including the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School, the Korematsu Lecture at New York University Law School, and the Barbara Aronstein Black Lecture at Columbia Law School. Volpp is a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She has served as a visiting faculty member at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and as faculty for the University of Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of Law.

Volpp is an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies, and is a core faculty member of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

She began teaching at the American University, Washington College of Law in 1998 and visited at UCLA School of Law in 2004-05. She is a 1986 Princeton alumna.