Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw Honored with Prestigious AALS Award

The Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law becomes the sixth person to receive the organization’s top honor. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Dear members of the Columbia Law School community,

It is with a deep sense of pride that I congratulate Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw on receiving the Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Legal Profession from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Among the most prestigious honors in the legal academy, the AALS Triennial Award was established in 2006 to recognize “career contributions by an outstanding faculty member” at a U.S. law school.

Over the past three decades, Professor Crenshaw’s expansive, seminal contributions have shaped our modern understanding of the law—including, perhaps most notably, introducing the language of intersectionality into modern parlance. A leading scholar of civil rights whose work has centered on critical race theory, race and the law, and feminist legal theory, Professor Crenshaw also serves as founding director of the Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2021 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education and named as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Please join me in expressing my sincere best wishes to Professor Crenshaw on this esteemed and well-deserved honor.

Best regards,

Gillian Lester
Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law