Bio
Cheryl I. Harris is the the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA Law. Some of her UCLA coursework includes Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, and Race Conscious Remedies. Author of the acclaimed “Whiteness as Property” (Harvard Law Review), Harris is a leading scholar in Critical Race Theory and is recognized for her foundational contributions to the field.
A graduate of Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law, Harris began her career as an appellate and trial litigator at leading criminal defense firms in Chicago. As part of her pro bono work, she contributed to major civil and human rights projects, including the police oversight measures and the development of anti-apartheid sanctions legislation. Following the historic election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harris became a senior legal advisor in the City’s Office of Legal Counsel, where she helped craft major reform initiatives designed to improve government accountability, transparency, and racial equity.
Harris began teaching law in 1990 at Chicago-Kent College of Law. In 1991, she was a key organizer of conferences between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution, ratified in 1994. Since then, she has been a part of human rights delegations in several conflict zones included Northern Ireland and Haiti and participated in convenings on race, inequality, and human rights across the globe.
In 1998, Harris joined the faculty at UCLA School of Law. She was a founding member of the law school’s Critical Race Studies Program and has served as its faculty director several times. She holds a joint appointment with UCLA’s Department of African American Studies and served as the department’s Chair from 2014-2016 in its early formation years.
Harris’ scholarship critically examines the relationship between law and racial power across several areas, including anti-discrimination law, property relations, and, more recently, conceptions of debt. Her work has appeared in leading law journals, including Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, and UCLA Law Review. Her engagement with civil rights history, Black political thought, and critical theory has led to publications in influential interdisciplinary journals and collections.
In 2019, Harris was a visiting scholar at RMIT University in Melbourne, building on her research on race and indigeneity. She has been a fellow at Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs Program and was selected to be a writer in residence at Hedgebrook in 2019. She has lectured widely at universities and conferences in the US, England, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Harris has served in the leadership of the American Studies Association, as a board member of the ACLU of Southern California, and as a member of the Selection Committee for Research and Writing Grants, MacArthur Foundation, Program in Peace and International Cooperation. In 2021, she was appointed to the City of Los Angeles Reparations Advisory Commission.
Harris has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking teacher, receiving the ACLU Foundation of Southern California’s Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education in 2005 and the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. In 2022, she was awarded UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She became the Law School’s first Vice-Dean of Community, Equality, and Justice in 2021.
Her current projects include an initiative responding to the attacks on Critical Race Theory, for which she was the principal investigator on a major grant and the revision of the landmark textbook Race, Racism and American Law by Derrick Bell.
Education
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Northwestern University, Pritzker School of Law
J.D. 1978 -
Wellesley College
B.A. 1973