Tomiko Brown-Nagin is the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Brown-Nagin holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and a law degree from Yale University, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Furman University.
In February, 2011, Oxford University Press published Brown-Nagin’s first sole-authored book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, a socio-legal history about lawyers, courts, and community-based activism during the civil rights era. The book discusses three generations of dissenters from the racial status quo and spotlights the work of lesser-known and unsung lawyers and activists.
At the University of Virginia, Brown-Nagin teaches constitutional law, constitutional and social history, and education law. She has written widely—on legal history, education law, and the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence. Leading law and history journals have published her work.
Brown-Nagin has begun researching her second book, a biography of the groundbreaking civil rights lawyer, politician, and jurist Constance Baker Motley. Its working title is “The Only Woman in the Courtroom”: Constance Baker Motley and Twentieth-Century Struggles for Equality.”
Brown-Nagin is actively involved in a variety of professional endeavors. She is a member of the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History. She is a pro bono consultant to public interest organizations. And she is a contributor to the Legal History Blog.
Brown-Nagin was the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School in Fall of 2008. Before joining the faculty at the University of Virginia, Brown-Nagin practiced law in New York City and clerked on the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, for the Honorable Jane Roth, and on the U. S. District Court, Southern District of New York, for the Honorable Robert L. Carter. She also held the Charles Hamilton Houston Fellowship at Harvard Law School, the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at New York University School of Law, and the Spencer Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
Scholarship Profile: Reconstructing Civil Rights Legal History From The Bottom Up (Virginia Journal 2010)
Professor Brown-Nagin can be reached by email at tb3u@virginia.edu.
