Professor Olatunde Johnson Honored With the 2026 Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching

Olatunde Johnson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law, says teaching Civil Procedure to 1Ls every fall is a privilege and a pleasure. “I love teaching students in their first semester,” says Johnson, whose scholarship focuses on civil rights, legislation, and antidiscrimination law. “It’s a real gift for me because the students are very open. They are invigorated, curious, and very enthusiastic intellectually, which I really appreciate.”

Students, in turn, appreciate her. “Professor Johnson is a pro. She is completely relaxed and confident in her teaching,” reads one student’s course evaluation. Another wrote: “She is indeed a teacher who loves to teach, and that shined through all semester.” 

Johnson is known for her commitment to engaging students and cultivating their success. After learning that the Class of 2026 selected her to receive the annual Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Johnson says she was “honored and grateful.”

It’s déjà vu for Johnson, who joined the faculty in 2006: She also won the Reese Prize in 2016, the same year Columbia University honored her with its Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by Faculty (making her the first member of the Law School faculty to receive both awards in the same year). 

She has received several other honors from Columbia over the years: Law School students named her the Public Interest Professor of the Year in 2009, and in 2023, the university recognized Johnson with its Faculty Service Award, which honors full-time faculty whose extraordinary and creative voluntary service has contributed significantly to the university’s inclusion and belonging efforts.

Great Expectations

Students describe Johnson as an exacting but empathetic instructor. “I try to provide students a space that is welcoming and kind but at the same time is pushing them intellectually and analytically,” she says. Students say this inspires them to strive for excellence. “[Civil Procedure] was my most demanding course, but she makes you want to put in the work,” wrote a student in a course evaluation. Another wrote that Johnson’s approach to cold calling “creates an environment in which you want to come prepared but aren’t afraid of being humiliated.” 

Johnson says she was drawn to academia by the opportunity to research and write, and some of her scholarship is “driven by questions that students ask me. I often think, yes, academics are my audience, but I also think of my students and try to write in ways that they will understand,” she says. “I think it’s really important that legal scholarship is accessible and interesting for lawyers as well as legal academics.”

The topics of her work often address current events; her recent academic writing has focused on the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action decision, how COVID-19 exposed the limitations of a social safety net in the U.S., and ideas for advancing racial equality in the federal government. Her most recent article, “Campus Crises and the Limits of Title VI,” co-written with Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law Suzanne Goldberg, makes a legal argument about what they see as the misuse of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and also a policy argument about balancing free speech and fostering an inclusive community on college campuses. 

The Path From Practice to Academia 

Teaching is in Johnson’s DNA. “My mother was a high school chemistry teacher, and my father was an economist at the International Monetary Fund, but for significant stretches of his career, he taught at the University of Michigan and in Sierra Leone,” she says. “My grandmother was a teacher. My grandfather was a minister and teacher. My great-grandfather was a teacher and the president of the university in Sierra Leone. I was even born on a college campus when my parents were getting their degrees at UCLA.”

Johnson grew up in Washington, D.C., and earned her undergraduate degree from Yale University. After graduating from Stanford Law School, she clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. She then spent four years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (now called the Legal Defense Fund or LDF), focusing on trial- and appellate-level litigation to promote racial and ethnic equity in employment, health, and higher education.

“I thought I’d stay at LDF forever—that was my dream job,” she says. But while there, she worked closely with the office of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on legislation around the enforcement of Title VI, and Kennedy hired her to be his civil rights counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2001 to 2003. After that, she worked as a senior consultant on racial justice in the ACLU’s National Legal Department from 2003 to 2004. 

During that time, she received a call from David M. Schizer, now Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law and Economics and Dean Emeritus, who was then head of the Law School’s hiring committee. The two had met years earlier when Johnson had a summer position at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and Schizer was an associate there. “He was looking for people who might not think of themselves as academics to come to the Law School, and he offered me a fellowship,” she says, “and that was the beginning of my career in academia.”

Bringing Expertise Into the Classroom

Johnson incorporates a public service and public interest viewpoint in her work. She remains “very much in touch with the civil rights community,” she says, adding that she often attends civil rights conferences where she talks to lawyers “about their litigation perspective, so I am able to use many examples from the real world in my lectures.” 

She also illustrates concepts in her Civil Procedure, Legislation and Regulation, and Antidiscrimination Law classes with cases she litigated or worked on herself. “Professor Johnson is an expert—and not just academically,” wrote one Antidiscrimination Law student in a course evaluation. “She brought lawsuits using most, if not all, of the statutes we examined in the class and helped craft some of the statutes themselves.”

Beyond the classroom, Johnson devotes a lot of time to mentoring and advising students. “I see it as a big part of my job,” she says. “I get a lot of questions about clerking, public interest work, different paths if you want to do impact litigation or direct service,” she says. “I also supervise a fair amount of student writing and am always happy when a student’s note gets published.”

She also prioritizes building community at the Law School, which she cultivates as one of the founding faculty directors of the Constitutional Democracy Initiative and as a co-director of the Center for Constitutional Governance (which both offer programming for law school students, faculty, and staff) and through initiatives such as Beyond the Casebook, which provides 1L students with opportunities to discuss current legal issues with faculty. 

In 2022, Johnson was named the first Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law, which she finds fitting because of their shared areas of expertise. “Ginsburg taught civil procedure as a professor here in the 1970s, when she was also arguing cases at the Supreme Court that formed what we think of as gender equality law,” says Johnson. She recalls being invited to a genteel tea in Ginsburg’s chamber at the Supreme Court while clerking for Justice Stevens. “It’s a really big honor to hold this professorship,” she says. “It raises my expectations for myself. I still get shivers down my body when anyone says the title out loud.”