Professor Robin A. Lenhardt was formerly a professor of law and faculty director of the Center on Race, Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. She specializes in matters pertaining to race, family, and citizenship. In addition to Fordham, Lenhardt has held teaching positions at Columbia Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the University of Chicago Law School. Before entering legal academia, Lenhardt held a number of positions in the private and nonprofit sectors. A law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and Judge Hugh Bownes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Lenhardt was formerly a Counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she was a member of the litigation team that defended the University of Michigan in the Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger affirmative action lawsuits. 

Lenhardt received a Skadden Foundation Fellowship to work as a staff attorney for the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and was employed as an attorney advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel. She later returned to the DOJ to review civil rights issues as part of President Barack Obama’s transition team. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including the California Law Review, the New York University Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. Lenhardt is currently co-editor of a book entitled Critical Race Judgements: U.S. Opinions on Race and Law that will be published soon. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Brown University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a MPA from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a LLM from the Georgetown University Law Center.