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Rachel Moran ’81JD

By the staff | 4:55pm June 11 2010

A year ago, reporters were seeking out Rachel Moran ’81JD for comment about her Yale Law School contemporary Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD. Now it’s Moran’s turn in the spotlight. Granted, her new position is not quite as prominent as a seat on the US Supreme Court. But come October 15, Moran will be “the first Latina dean of a top 20-rated US law school”—the University of California at Los Angeles—according to a UCLA press release.

Moran, an expert in race and the law who has also helped develop a theory of “friendship law,” has invested a career teaching in the UC system. She joined the faculty at Boalt Hall, Berkeley’s law school, in 1983. That’s where—invited by Moran to a symposium in 2001—Sotomayor delivered her famous “wise Latina” remark. (“I don’t think anybody thought it was incendiary or inflammatory or anything like that,” Moran told the Wall Street Journal last year.)

More recently, Moran took a leave from Berkeley to help establish a law school at UC Irvine. “I find it most exciting,” she said, “to think about how to build a curriculum that will prepare students for being lawyers in the 21st century.” Now the dean will have her chance.

Filed under alumnae, Law School, milestones, appointed
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