Laura Rosenbury (President of Barnard College, United States)

A leading feminist legal theorist, Laura Rosenbury was appointed Barnard’s ninth president this summer.

President Rosenbury came to the College after eight years as a professor and the Dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law. The first woman to hold that position, she distinguished herself as a leader by raising UF Law’s national and international profile.

Before joining the UF Law community, President Rosenbury spent 13 years at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, where she served as a faculty member and vice dean. She was also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and University of Chicago Law School.

In her scholarship, President Rosenbury focuses on the law of private relationships, exploring how law and social norms interact in family law, employment discrimination law, and property law, and her expertise extends to reproductive rights, children’s rights, and sexual harassment. Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and in many other journals and books. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2010 and was named a fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2014.

President Rosenbury received her A.B. summa cum laude in women’s studies from Harvard-Radcliffe College and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before entering academia in 2002, she worked as a litigation associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City, primarily defending corporations in white-collar criminal cases. She also clerked for Judge Carol Bagley Amon of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and Judge Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.