UVA Law dean stepping down after eight-year run
Risa L. Goluboff, the high-performing dean of the University of Virginia’s high-ranked law school, plans to step down June 30 and return to teaching.
She says it’s time. She will have served eight years in the post, the magic number for the dean before her and the average for the past three. “My predecessors are very wise in many ways,” she says.
Under Goluboff, UVA Law grew an already substantial endowment by 75 percent to $828 million by the end of fiscal 2022-23 and, not unrelated, went on a hiring spree. Throughout, it held its U.S. News & World Report top 10 ranking, the highest of any UVA school. (It ranks eighth this year, even after Goluboff declined participation, objecting to the methodology, as did peer schools.)
“She was extraordinarily successful as dean, one of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere,” says John C. Jeffries Jr. (Law ’73), a member of the law faculty during eight deanships, including his own from 2001 through 2008. He led the search that promoted Goluboff from professor to dean in 2016, the first woman in the role. With Provost Ian B. Baucom, Jeffries co-chairs the hunt for her successor.
A leading legal historian, Goluboff, 52, earned academic honors with dispatch. After graduating from Harvard University summa cum laude in 1994, she parallel-tracked graduate work in history at Princeton University with law studies at Yale University. The doubling up got her her Princeton master’s one year and her Yale law degree the next. After two years of federal appellate clerkships, one with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, she joined the UVA law faculty in 2002. She again multitasked, teaching law while completing her Princeton doctorate in history in 2003.
“I don’t sleep a huge amount, but I sleep, and I don’t do caffeine,” she said when challenged on the number of hours in a day. “I recognize that I am a fairly fast-paced and energetic person, and I am grateful for that.”
She has an unpretentious style that combines intellectual rigor with personal warmth. To her, that’s the culture of UVA Law. It’s what drew her here. She remembers the job fair where she worked her way down a hallway for a series of 30-minute interviews with the law schools interested in hiring her. The more personable conversations weren’t that challenging, and the more challenging ones weren’t that nice. Then came her half-hour with UVA—“which was kind and warm, and engaged and rigorous, and had lots of different perspectives, and asked me questions I had not thought of before,” she says.
She hits similar notes when asked for her recruiting pitch, the one that has helped the law school make a series of high-profile hires since 2019, accounting for 20 of its 81 tenure-line faculty. “This is a place where, No. 1, you can come and make a home and have a wonderful life,” she says, “and No. 2, where you’re going to have colleagues who read your work, come to your workshops, and you’re going to be in intellectual discussions with them, and you’re going to have students who are interested in your ideas.”
Goluboff’s success has come amid both prosperity, like the record $50 million gift she helped land, and challenge. COVID, where her team innovated in ways other schools couldn’t to resume in-person classes quickly, is an example of the latter. So is the deadly mayhem of August 11-12, 2017, when supremacists descended for what would ominously become known as “Charlottesville.”
Days after, then-President Teresa A. Sullivan appointed Goluboff to head a task force of UVA deans to recommend safeguards and reforms. Sullivan was on her way out, having announced retirement plans months before, and her successor, James E. Ryan (Law ’92), wouldn’t arrive for another year as he wound up his deanship of Harvard’s education school. That put Goluboff’s Deans Working Group on the frontlines of extraordinary post-trauma amid a leadership transition.
August 2017 and its aftermath continue to weigh on Goluboff. She’s been wrestling with whether to devote her next book to the subject, a legal history that would draw from the archive she’s been compiling of related cases and laws. The emotional investment gives her pause. “To spend six or seven years thinking about that ugliness and being immersed in it, I’m ambivalent about that,” she says.
She will take those ruminations with her on a year of sabbatical. As she does, others may ruminate about whether UVA can keep her. We put that prospect to Jeffries, whose relevant experience includes the Ryan presidential search. His response: “Do I think that that the world out there will have noticed Risa, and that she will have leadership opportunities? Yes.”
The dean demurs. “I don’t have any plans to go anywhere other than UVA Law School after my sabbatical,” Goluboff says. “You can’t account for lightning, but that’s my plan.”