March 11, 2025
Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss- CU Law School
Law Schools, Law, and the Legal Historical Moment
Lolita Buckner Inniss is the 17th dean, the second woman dean, and the first Black dean of the University of Colorado Law School, where she is also Provost’s Professor of Law and an affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies. As Dean, she has broadened access and equity for students, filled vital teaching needs by hiring one of the most accomplished and largest cohorts of faculty in the history of Colorado Law, and shepherded one of the largest clinical gifts in the history of the school. She has authored scores of articles, essays, and the prize-winning legal history book, The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson.
Law Schools, Law, and the Legal Historical Moment
Though much has changed in law schools and in the general endeavor of law over the past several decades in the U.S., at the heart of law school and the broader legal regime in the 21st century are practices and norms that were developed well over a century ago. The legal past, whether in instances deemed victorious or vanquishing, shapes the present and ultimately our future. How do we reconcile the up and down arcs of law schools and of law more broadly while preparing for the legal future? In other words, how do we live in what Dean Inniss has termed the Legal Historical Moment: an ongoing recognition that the triumphs and traumas of the legal past help us to reform our present and form our future?
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