Rachel F. Moran

Rachel F. Moran is Professor of Law and Director of the Education Law Program at Texas A&M University School of Law.  She previously was Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law, Dean Emerita and Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, and the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law.  Professor Moran has written over 100 articles, book chapters, and short commentaries exploring such topics as bilingual education, desegregation, and affirmative action.  In addition, she is co-author of one of the most widely adopted casebooks in the field, Educational Policy and the Law (Cengage 2011) (with Mark Yudof, Betsy Levin, James Ryan, and Kristi Bowman).  Professor Moran also has published extensively on questions of race and the law.  Her work includes two highly regarded books on the subject:  Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago 2001), and Race Law Stories (Foundation Press 2008) (with Devon Carbado).

In 2015, Professor Moran became the inaugural William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation (ABF).  In that role, she launched a research project on “The Future of Latinos in the United States: Law, Opportunity, and Mobility” with Robert Nelson, the ABF’s Director Emeritus.  Recently, Moran has published several articles based on this work.  These include: Moran, The Perennial Eclipse: Race, Immigration, and How Latinx Count in American Politics,” 61 Houston Law Review 719 (2024); Moran, “Personhood, Property, and Public Education: The Case of Plyler v. Doe,” 123 Columbia Law Review 1271 (2023), Moran, “Diversity’s Distractions Revisited: The Case of Latinx in Higher Education,” 73 South Carolina Law Review 579 (2022); Moran, “The Pocketbook Next Time: From Civil Rights to Market Power in the Latinx Community,” 71 American University Law Review 579 (2021); “Citizenship, Personhood, and the Constitution in 2020,” Harvard Law & Policy Review (2020); and “Dreamers Interrupted: The Case of the Rescission of the Program of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” 53 UC Davis Law Review 1905 (2020).

In September 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Professor Moran to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. She was President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 2009 and previously served on the AALS Executive Committee. In May 2014, American Bar Association (ABA) President James Silkenat appointed her to the ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education. Moran was a member of the Standing Committee for the ABA Division of Public Education and a Senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 2019, she became a Distinguished Lecturer for the Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2020, the Institute selected her as a Fellow.  In addition, Moran is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and a Fellow of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto de Derechos Civiles.  From 1993 to 1996 Moran served as Chair of the Chicano/Latino Policy Project (now the Center for Latino Policy Research) at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change, and in 2003, she became Director of the Institute. In 2026, she received the Michael A. Olivas Award for Outstanding Leadership in Diversity and Mentoring in the Legal Academy from the Association of American Law Schools, and in 2025, she was awarded the Professor Michael Olivas Educational Excellence Award by the Hispanic Lawyers Section of the State Bar of Texas, and in 1995, she received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.