Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Professor of Law

Professor of History, Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Research Interests

• Constitutional Law & Equality
• Constitutional & Social History
• Comparative Constitutionalism
• Access to Education
• Law and Social Change
• Judging

Subject Areas for Supervising Written Work

• Equal Rights
• Law and Education
• Law and Social Change
• Legal History

Subject Areas for Accepting Press Inquiries

• Constitutional Law
• Education Law
• Law & Inequality

Education

• Furman University B.A. 1992, History
• Duke University M.A. 1993, U.S. Political and Social History
• Yale University J.D. 1997
• Duke University Ph.D. 2002, U.S. Social, Political, and Legal History

Appointments

• Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History, 2008
• Professor of Law, 2012
• Professor of History, Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2012

Biographical Statement

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is an awarding-winning historian and expert in constitutional law and education law and policy. Her 2011 book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford), won the Bancroft Prize in US History, one of the highest honors awarded annually to a work in the field of history. Brown-Nagin was the first woman of color to receive the Bancroft. Courage to Dissent also received five other prizes, including the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Book Award, the American Society for Legal History's John Phillip Reid Award, the Southern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, Brown-Nagin held joint appointments in law and history at the University of Virginia and at Washington University. Before entering academia, Brown-Nagin clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter of the U. S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and for the Honorable Jane Roth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She also worked as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City. Brown-Nagin earned a doctorate in history from Duke, a law degree from Yale, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and earned a B.A. in history, summa cum laude, from Furman University.

Representative Publications

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "The Diversity Paradox: Judicial Review in an Age of Demographic and Educational Change (Supreme Court Roundup on Fisher v. Texas)," 65 Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc 113 (2012).
  Full text: WWW || WWW
  
• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press 2011).
  Full text: AMAZON (Purchase)
  
• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "Missouri v. Jenkins: Why District Courts and Local Politics Matter" in Civil Rights Stories (Myriam Gilles & Risa Goluboff eds., Foundation Press, 2007).
  
• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "Elites, Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action," 105 Columbia Law Review 1436 (2005).
  Full text: HEIN
  
• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "The Transformative Racial Politics of Justice Clarence Thomas?: The Grutter v. Bollinger Opinion," 7 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 787 (2005).
  Full text: HEIN
  
• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "Race as Identity Caricature: A Local Legal History Lesson in the Salience of Intra-Racial Conflict," 151 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1913 (2003).
  Full text: HEIN
  

Bibliography

View bibliography