Rachel F. Moran, a Berkeley Law faculty member since 1983, has been selected as the new dean at UCLA School of Law. When she begins her new role on October 15, Moran will become the first Latina dean of a top 20-rated U.S. law school.
Berkeley Law’s Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law, Moran served as president of the Association of American Law Schools in 2009. She has published and lectured extensively on education law and policy, family law, and civil rights and anti-discrimination law.
Moran, who teaches torts, race and the law, and education law, will also be a professor of law at UCLA. “Her record of scholarship has earned her the highest regard among her peers,” says UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. As dean she succeeds Michael H. Schill, who was UCLA Law’s dean from 2004 to 2009.
In 1995, Moran received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley. She served as chair of the Chicano/Latino Policy Project from 1993 to 1996, and was director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change from 2003 to 2008. In addition to her varied work at Berkeley, Moran was a founding faculty member at the UC Irvine School of Law.
Following her undergraduate education at Stanford and law school at Yale, Moran clerked for Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and worked for Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in San Francisco. She has been a visiting professor at several top law schools, including UCLA, Stanford, New York University, the University of Miami, and the University of Texas.
Stephen C. Yeazell, UCLA Law’s interim dean, calls Moran “a respected and accomplished legal scholar, an excellent and dedicated teacher, and a terrific institution builder.”