Job title:
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice
Department:
Berkeley Law
Bio/CV:
is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity.
Her most recent publications include “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings’: the Construction of a Problem(opens in a new tab)” in Constitutional Commentary (2019), “Refugees Welcome?(opens in a new tab)” in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (2018), “Passports in the Time of Trump(opens in a new tab)” in Symploke (2018), “Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship(opens in a new tab)” in the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017), “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law (2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women(opens in a new tab)” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between(opens in a new tab) (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019) and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders(opens in a new tab) (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles.
Volpp currently directs the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender(opens in a new tab), and is an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies, and is a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.
After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993, Volpp clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson ’62 of the Northern District of California, and then worked as a public interest lawyer for several years. Volpp served as a Skadden Fellow at Equal Rights Advocates and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, both in San Francisco; as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C.; and as a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New York City.
Role:
