Gail Heriot
Arlene Penticoff
apenticoff@SanDiego.edu
(619) 260-6843
Karin Spidel
kspidel@SanDiego.edu
(619) 260-2962
Professor of Law
- JD, 1981, University of Chicago
- BA, 1978, Northwestern University
Areas of Expertise
Employment and Labor Law, Products Liability, Torts, Civil Rights
Professional Experience
Heriot clerked for the Honorable Seymour F. Simon on the Illinois Supreme Court. Prior to entering academia, she practiced with Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago and Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C. She also served as civil rights counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and as associate dean and professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law. She joined the USD School of Law faculty in 1989.
Honors and Affiliations
Heriot is currently a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif. She sits on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars and the California Association of Scholars.
Scholarly Work
- A Dubious Expediency, in A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education (Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild eds., Encounter Books 2021)
- A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education (Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild eds., Encounter Books 2021)
- The Sausage Factory, in A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education (Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild eds., Encounter Books 2021) (with Mulder)
- Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal: It Gives the Federal Bureaucracy Extraordinary Discretionary Power. But What Does It Do to the Rule of Law? And Who Benefits?, 14 NYU Journal of Law & Liberty 1 (2020)
- The Department of Education's Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law, 22 Texas Review of Law & Politics 471 (2018) (with Somin)