University of Virginia School of Law has named legal historian Risa Goluboff as its new dean to succeed Paul Mahoney, who will be returning to the law school's faculty next summer. She will be the first woman to hold the position.

Goluboff, who will start her deanship on July 1, 2016, is the John Allan Love Professor of Law and Professor of History at University of Virginia, where she has taught since 2003 with a focus on civil rights and constitutional law. She received the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award for her book, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” and the university's All-University Teaching Award in 2011. Her 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship helped support research for her forthcoming book, “Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s,” to be published next year by Oxford University Press.

Goluboff earned her Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2000, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer during the 2001-02 term, and arrived at University of Virginia School of Law in 2002 as a research associate professor before formally joining the law school's faculty as an associate professor upon her receiving her doctorate in history from Princeton in 2003.