Lolita Buckner Inniss

Dean and Provost's Professor of Law

401 UCB
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Wolf Law Building Room 323
Boulder, CO  80309
Office: 323C
E-mail: lawdean@colorado.edu

Bio:
Lolita Buckner Inniss is a distinguished academic leader, scholar, and public servant. She is currently the 17th dean in the University of Colorado Law School's 132-year history, the second woman dean, and the first Black Dean. She is also a Provost's Professor of Law and is an affiliate of the Center for African & African American Studies. As Dean she has worked to broaden access and equity for students, has filled vital teaching needs by hiring one of the most accomplished and largest cohorts of faculty in the history of Colorado Law, and has shepherded one of the largest clinical gifts in the history of the school.

Highlights of Scholarly Work and Teaching

Dean Inniss is a highly regarded scholar with a prominent national and international voice in her fields. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a national association of some of the most highly accomplished lawyers, judges and legal scholars in the country. She is the author of scores of articles and essays, and of the prize-winning legal history book The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson (Fordham University Press, 2020). The book was the winner of the New Jersey Academic Alliance Book Award in 2022 and received an invited nomination for the Gilder Lehrman Frederick Douglass Book prize. The Princeton Fugitive Slave was also nominated by the Association of University Presses as a Community Read book and was reviewed in the New York Review of Books in 2022. In addition, The Princeton Fugitive Slave was named by the Center for Compassionate Leadership as one of the five books leaders should read on the topic of racism, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. The Princeton Fugitive Slave is a vital resource in the study of slavery and universities and has been assigned as reading material at colleges and universities around the country. Her most recent work, Social Movements and the Law, is an edited book that brings together prominent scholars and public intellectuals to examine the ways in which contemporary social movements challenge, shape, and illuminate the legal landscape. The collection has garnered early acclaim from experts in law, race, and gender studies and is anticipated to make a significant contribution to the field of socio-legal scholarship.

Dean Inniss has attained deep knowledge of the legal academy via her work teaching across the law school curriculum. She began as a professor of legal reasoning and writing, and later transitioned to clinical instruction, where she specialized in immigration law and practice, particularly political asylum. Over the course of her career, Dean Inniss has primarily focused on teaching property law, criminal law, and comparative racism and the law.

Books
* Social Movements and the Law (with Bridget Crawford) (University of California Press, 2024)
* The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson (Fordham University Press, 2019; 2020)

Recent Articles, Essays and Book Chapters
* The Past and Present of Slavery in the United States, in Critical Legal Perspectives on Contemporary Slavery: On the Presence of the Past' Adelle Blackett, Edward Van Daalen, eds. (Brill, forthcoming 2024)
* Abortion Law as Protection Narrative, 101 Oregon Law Review 213 (lead article, 2023)
* Expanding the Boundaries of Knowledge About Slavery and Its Legacy, 94 Colorado Law Review 381 (Invited author, 2023)
* Should I Stay or Should I Go? 26 Green Bag 2D 19 (2023)
* "Roxanne Shante's 'Independent Woman': Making Space for Women in Hip Hop," in Gregory S. Parks and Frank Rudy Cooper, editors, Hip Hop Law and Policy (2022, Cambridge University Press)
* "Property Law Revolution, Devolution, and Feminist Legal Theory," in Eloisa C. Rodriguez-Dod and Elena Maria Marty-Nelson, editors, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Property Opinions of The United States Supreme Court (Invited author, 2021; Cambridge University Press)
* Slavery and the Postbellum University, 74 SMU Law Review (2021)
* It's About Bloody Time and Space, 41 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 146 (Invited author, 2021)
* Race, Space and Surveillance: A Response to #LivingWhileBlack: Blackness as Nuisance, by Taja-Nia Henderson and Jamila Jefferson-Jones, American University Law Review Forum 213 (Invited author, 2020)
* (Un)Common Law and the Female Body, 61 Boston College Law Review Electronic Supplement (Invited author, 2020)
* While the Water is Stirring: Sojourner Truth as Proto-agonist in the Fight for (Black) Women's Rights, 100 Boston University Law Review 1637 (Invited author, 2020)

Education
Dean Inniss received her A.B. from Princeton University where she majored in Romance Languages in Literature and earned certificates (minors) in African American and Latin American Studies. At Princeton she won the National Urban League Essay Prize, was awarded a Latin American Travel Studies Scholarship, and was a Princeton in France Scholar. She earned her J.D. from UCLA where she was a moot court honors participant and an editor of the National Black Law Journal, the first law journal in the country to focus on legal issues at the intersection of race and law. She later earned an LL.M. with Distinction and a Ph.D. in law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Canada. At Osgoode she was awarded the Mary Jane Mossman Award for Work in Feminist Legal Theory and the Harley D. Hallett Award, and was named a Peter Hogg Scholar.

Previous Employment Highlights
Before coming to the University of Colorado Law School, Dean Inniss was the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at SMU Dedman School of Law, the number two leadership position at the law school, and was a Professor of Law. She was the first Black woman to attain full tenure in the law school's 100-year history, and the first and only Black woman to serve as Senior Associate Dean. She was also the first Black woman in SMU's 113-year history to be named a University Distinguished Professor, an honor reserved for outstanding faculty members from across the campus who have proven themselves to be outstanding teachers/scholars with exceptional academic records according to rigorous nationally accepted standards. In addition, she served as an inaugural Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow.

Prior to joining SMU, Dean Inniss served on the faculty of Cleveland State University Law School, where she was a holder of the Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker and Hostetler Chair in Law and won the Provost's Merit Award. She was the first Black person in the law school's 127-year history to hold a distinguished chair. She also held the Elihu Root Peace Fund Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College, a distinguished chair position. In addition, Dean Inniss was a fellow of the New York University-Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France. CNRS is one of Europe's and the world's most esteemed research institutes.

Selected Public and Non-profit Service
* Chair, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Women in Legal Education section
* Board member, Law School Admissions Council (LSAC)
* Co-founder, AALS Law Deans' Clearinghouse on Freedom of Speech
* Member, AALS Deans' Steering Committee
* Founding Board Member, Lutie Legacy Society (a national organization dedicated to recruiting, supporting and retaining Black women law professors)
* United States Special Rapporteur on the topic of contemporary slavery for the International Academy of Comparative Law
* Legal Resource Team Member, American Bar Association/United Nations Development Program
* Life Member and Past President, Association of Black Princeton Alumni
* Founding Board Member, Princeton Charter School
* Member, Executive Committee, Princeton University Alumni Council

Personal
Dean Inniss, a first generation college and law school attendee, is a multigenerational native of Los Angeles, California on her maternal side, and is also descended from Tulsa massacre survivors. On her paternal side she descends from a great-great-grandfather who served at Appomattox in the US Civil War and who was an early Colorado inhabitant. Dean Inniss is an avid genealogist, and deploys these skills for both scholarly and personal projects; on both her maternal and paternal sides she has traced her family back to 18th century Virginia.

Forthcoming

Social Movements and the Law, (with Bridget Crawford) (University of California Press, forthcoming 2024).

The Past and Present of Slavery in the United States, in Critical Legal Perspectives on Contemporary Slavery: On the Presence of the Past (Adelle Blackett and Edward Van Daalen, eds., Brill, forthcoming 2024).

Published Books

The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson, (Fordham University Press, 2020). A scholarly review is available at Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

Articles

Abortion Law as Protection Narrative, 101 Oregon Law Review, 213 (Lead article, 2023).

Expanding the Boundaries of Knowledge About Slavery and Its Legacy, 94 Colorado Law Review 381 (Invited author, 2023).

Should I Stay or Should I Go?, 26 Green Bag 2D 19 (2023); republished on Taxprof Blog, "The Clash And The U.S. News Law School Rankings: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?".

It's About Bloody Time and Space, 41 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law (2021) (Invited author).

Buckner Inniss (with Skyler Arbuckle), Slavery and the Postbellum University, 74 SMU Law Review (2021).

Race, Space and Surveillance: A Response to #LivingWhileBlack: Blackness as Nuisance, by Taja-Nia Henderson and Jamila Jefferson-Jones, American University Law Review Forum 213 (2020) (Invited author).

(Un)Common Law and the Female Body, 61 Boston College Law Review Electronic Supplement (2020) (Invited author).

'While the Water is Stirring': Sojourner Truth as Proto-agonist in the Fight for (Black) Women's Rights, 100 Boston University Law Review 1637 (2020) (Invited author).

Book Chapters

Property Law Revolution, Devolution, and Feminist Legal Theory, in FEMINIST JUDGMENTS: REWRITTEN PROPERTY OPINIONS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT (Eloisa C. Rodriguez-Dod and Elena Maria Marty-Nelson, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2021) (Invited guest essayist).

Roxanne Shante's 'Independent Woman': Making Space for Women in Hip Hop, in HIP HOP LAW AND POLICY (Gregory S. Parks and Frank Rudy Cooper, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2021) .

The Lucky Law Professor and the Eucatastrophic Moment, in PRESUMED INCOMPETENT II (Carmen Gonzalez, ed., University Press of Colorado, 2020) (Invited author).

Ships' Ballast as an Object of International Law, in INTERNATIONAL LAW'S OBJECTS: EMERGENCE, ENCOUNTER AND ERASURE THROUGH OBJECT AND IMAGE (Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce, eds., Oxford University Press, 2019) (Invited author).

Cecelia Kell v. Canada, in FEMINIST JUDGMENTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW, (Hart Publishing, September 2019) (with Jessie Hohmann and Enzamaria Tramontana).