Lolita Buckner Inniss

Dean
Provost's Professor of Law

SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION

lawdean@colorado.edu

Address

401 UCB
2450 Kittredge Loop Drive
Wolf Law Building
Boulder, CO 80309
Office 323C

Lolita Buckner Inniss is a distinguished academic leader, scholar, and public servant. She currently serves as the 17th dean of the University of Colorado Law School and holds the title of Provost’s Professor of Law. She is also an affiliate of the Center for African & African American Studies. As Dean, she has worked to advance access and equity for students, met critical instructional needs through the recruitment of one of the most accomplished and largest cohorts of faculty in the school’s history, and overseen one of the largest clinical education gifts ever received by the institution.

Scholarly Work and Teaching

Dean Inniss is a widely respected legal scholar with a distinguished national and international reputation. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an honor that reflects her standing among the nation’s most accomplished legal professionals and scholars. Her prolific body of work includes scores of articles and essays, as well as the acclaimed legal history book The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson (Fordham University Press, 2020).

The Princeton Fugitive Slave has garnered significant recognition. It received the New Jersey Academic Alliance Book Award in 2022 and was an invited nominee for the prestigious Yale Gilder Lehrman Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The Association of University Presses selected it as a Community Read, and it was reviewed by the New York Review of Books. The Center for Compassionate Leadership named the book one of five essential readings for leaders committed to addressing racism—alongside works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander. It has been adopted as required reading at colleges and universities across the country and is widely regarded as a foundational text in the study of slavery and higher education.

Dean Inniss’s most recent scholarly work, Social Movements and the Law (with Bridget Crawford, University of California Press, 2024) is an edited volume that convenes leading scholars and public intellectuals to examine how contemporary social movements influence, contest, and reshape legal norms. The collection has already received high praise from experts in law, race, and gender studies and is poised to make a lasting impact in the field of socio-legal scholarship.

Dean Inniss also brings deep experience in legal education, having taught across the law school curriculum. She began her academic career in legal writing and transitioned to clinical teaching, specializing in immigration law and political asylum. For most of her teaching career she has focused on property law and the intersection of race and legal systems, with particular emphasis on comparative approaches to racism and the law.

Books

Social Movements and the Law (with Bridget Crawford) (University of California Press, 2024)
The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson (Fordham University Press, 2019; 2020)

Education

Dean Inniss earned her A.B. from Princeton University, where she majored in Romance Languages and Literature and completed certificates in African American Studies and Latin American Studies. While at Princeton, she was awarded the National Urban League Essay Prize, a Latin American Travel Studies Scholarship, and was named a Princeton-in-France Scholar. She received her J.D. from the UCLA School of Law, where she was a moot court honors participant and served as an editor of the National Black Law Journal, the first legal journal in the United States dedicated to issues at the intersection of race and law. Dean Inniss later earned an LL.M. with Distinction and a Ph.D. in Law from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada. At Osgoode, she was the recipient of the Mary Jane Mossman Award for Excellence in Feminist Legal Studies, the Harley D. Hallett Award, and was named a Peter Hogg Scholar.

Previous Employment Highlights

Before joining the University of Colorado Law School, Dean Inniss served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at SMU Dedman School of Law, the second-highest leadership position within the law school, and held the title of Professor of Law. At SMU, she was named a University Distinguished Professor—one of the institution’s highest faculty honors—awarded to those who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and scholarship based on nationally recognized standards. She also served as the inaugural Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow.

Earlier in her career, Dean Inniss was a member of the faculty at Cleveland State University College of Law, where she held the Joseph C. Hostetler–Baker and Hostetler Chair in Law and was recognized with the Provost’s Merit Award for outstanding faculty achievement. She also held the Elihu Root Peace Fund Visiting Professorship in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College, a prestigious visiting chair. Additionally, she was a fellow at the New York University–Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France—one of Europe’s leading research institutions.

Selected Public and Non-profit Service

Chair, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Women in Legal Education section
Board member, Law School Admissions Council (LSAC)
Co-founder, AALS Law Deans’ Clearinghouse on Freedom of Speech
Member, AALS Deans’ Steering Committee
Founding Board Member, Lutie Legacy Society (a national organization dedicated to recruiting, supporting and retaining Black women law professors)
United States Special Rapporteur on the topic of contemporary slavery for the International Academy of Comparative Law
Legal Resource Team Member, American Bar Association/United Nations Development Program
Life Member and Past President, Association of Black Princeton Alumni
Founding Board Member, Princeton Charter School
Member, Executive Committee, Princeton University Alumni Council

Personal

Dean Inniss, a first-generation college and law school attendee, is a multigenerational native of Los Angeles, California on her maternal side, and is also descended from Tulsa massacre survivors. On her paternal side she descends from a great-great-grandfather who served at Appomattox in the US Civil War and who was an early Colorado inhabitant. Dean Inniss is an avid genealogist and deploys these skills for both scholarly and personal projects; on both her maternal and paternal sides she has traced her family back to 18th century Virginia.

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