Prof. Kimberly J. Robinson

Professor Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is a national expert who speaks domestically and internationally about educational equity, equal educational opportunity, civil rights and the federal role in education. Her scholarship has been published widely in leading journals and proposes innovative legal and policy solutions for ensuring that all children receive equal access to an excellent education. In 2019, New York University Press will publish her second edited book, tentatively titled Thoughts on a Federal Right to Education, which gathers leading constitutional and education law scholars to consider the challenging questions raised by recognizing a federal right to education in the United States. In 2015, Harvard Education Press published her book that was co-edited with Professor Charles Ogletree, Jr. of Harvard Law School titled The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity. Professor Robinson’s article, titled “Disrupting Education Federalism” in the Washington University Law Review, won the 2016 Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law from the Education Law Association. This article argues that the United States should reconstruct its understanding of education federalism to support a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education.

Professor Robinson published “Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education” in the November 2016 issue of the Harvard Law Review, which analyzes the legal and policy issues regarding the challenge to the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. In 2016, she published an article in the Stanford Law and Policy Review titled “No Quick Fix for Equity and Excellence: The Virtues of Incremental Shifts in Education Federalism” that proposes how the federal government could incrementally increase its influence over education in ways that would promote equity and excellence in school funding. Her scholarship has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, Boston College Law Review, William and Mary Law Review, and UC Davis Law Review, among other venues.

Professor Robinson was a visiting professor at the George Washington University Law School in spring 2017 where she taught Race, Racism and the Law. Professor Robinson is a Senior Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, a leading think tank on education policy, where she is working with Linda Darling-Hammond on issues related to educational access and equality.

Among her many service roles at the University of Richmond, Professor Robinson recently served as chair of the law school’s Diversity Committee and co-chair of a university-wide faculty learning community on reducing implicit bias in teaching. She previously served as co-chair of the Faculty Senate’s Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Committee, where she led the drafting of recommendations for strengthening the University’s sexual assault policy, including many recommendations that were incorporated into a revised sexual assault policy. Professor Robinson also served as chair of a university-wide faculty learning community on reducing stereotype threat in teaching.

Prior to joining the Richmond Law faculty in 2010, Professor Robinson was an Associate Professor at Emory University School of Law and a visiting fellow at George Washington University Law School. She also served in the General Counsel’s Office of the United States Department of Education, where she helped draft federal policy on issues of race, sex, and disability discrimination. In addition, Professor Robinson represented school districts in school finance and constitutional law litigation as an associate with Hogan & Hartson, LLP (now Hogan Lovells). Professor Robinson is a frequent lecturer on education law and policy issues, including serving as the Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in March 2014 and the keynote speaker at the "Is Education a Civil Right?" conference at Harvard Law School in April 2013. She also has written editorials that address national education law and policy issues, including co-authoring with Professor Charles Ogletree, Jr. an article in 2017 in Education Next titled “Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy” and “Neglecting the Broken Foundation of K-12 Funding” in Education Week on May 18, 2016. Professor Robinson organized a conference to analyze the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 2013.