Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is an American legal historian and expert in constitutional law and education law and policy. In 2011, Brown-Nagin published Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement,which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize in history. She is a proponent of a new college admissions strategy that calls on selective institutions of higher education to admit and financially support greater numbers of students who are the first in their families to attend college.
Brown-Nagin is the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of History at Harvard University, and Co-Director of the Program in Law and History. Previously, she was the T. Munford Boyd Professor of Law and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School.

Brown-Nagin earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal, a Ph.D in history from Duke University, and a B.A. in history, summa cum laude, from Furman University. After graduating from Yale Law School she clerked for Robert L. Carter of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and for Jane Roth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She held the Charles Hamilton Houston Fellowship at Harvard Law School and a Golieb legal history fellowship at NYU before entering private practice as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York.

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. “Rethinking Proxies for Economic Disadvantage in Higher Education,” 2014 U. Chicago Legal Forum.

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. “Two Americas in Healthcare: Federalism and Wars over Poverty from the New Deal-Great Society to Obamacare,” 62 Drake L. Review (2014).

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "The Diversity Paradox: Judicial Review in an Age of Demographic and Educational Change” 65 Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc 113 (2012)

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press 2011).

• Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. "Elites, Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action," 105 Columbia Law Review 1436 (2005).

• 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).