The College of Law is pleased to welcome Leslie Culver as a legal methods professor. She will start her position on July 1. Culver arrives in Utah from the California Western School of Law in Irvine, where she has taught legal writing since 2009 and directed the school’s A.I.M. for Law, a diversity pipeline program designed to encourage students from underrepresented communities to consider law school.
Culver’s research interests lie at the nexus of critical race theory, feminist communication, and social science, with a central goal to empower marginalized law students and attorneys toward conscious identity performance.
“Professor Culver will make a wonderful addition to our legal methods faculty. She has a wealth of experience teaching in the area and has a scholarly agenda that critically analyzes foundational concepts of legal writing and analysis,” said Jeff Schwartz, William H. Leary Professor of Law, who also served as chair of the hiring committee. “To top it off, she has won a Fulbright Award that will allow her to visit South Africa to consider her research interests from an international perspective.”
Culver will travel to South Africa in early summer. Her Fulbright grant will bring her to the University of the Free State (“UFS”) in South Africa where she will work with the Department of Public Law at UFS related to research on “Conscious Identity Performance and Legal Practice: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and South Africa.” The project will explore the South African legal education system, legal profession and broader legal culture to develop comparative perspectives on teaching legal writing to and the identity performance strategies of traditionally marginalized attorneys in the United States and South Africa.