Meet Dean Kendrick

As a veteran law professor with two terminal degrees, incoming Dean Leslie Kendrick ’06 has plenty of “first days” under her belt.

From growing up on a Kentucky dirt road, to earning two Oxford graduate degrees in English literature as a Rhodes Scholar, to studying and then teaching law at the University of Virginia, Kendrick has spent many a fall day adjusting to her new surroundings or putting new students at ease. On Monday, she starts her new role leading UVA Law School as the 13th dean to serve in the institution’s 205-year history. And it all began with another first day — when she arrived at the Law School as a student on a full-tuition Hardy Cross Dillard Scholarship.

“I remember what it was like to start here as a first-year student, and how nervous I was, but also how incredibly thrilled I was to start my legal education,” Kendrick said. “And I didn’t even know at the time all the great opportunities I would have in terms of classes, summer jobs and work after law school, as well as all the amazing speakers to see, and activities and organizations to be a part of.”

Kendrick’s UVA pedigree and her academic achievements opened the doors to two clerkships — for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III ’72 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Justice David Souter at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wilkinson called Kendrick “one of the smartest, nicest clerks I ever had,” and someone who has “innate good judgment and a sense of fairness that touches everyone around her. She holds educational excellence and mutual supportiveness in equal balance.”

After her clerkships, Kendrick returned to the Law School to begin her teaching career in 2008.

“My sisters and I grew up in a place where we had tons and tons of extended family, and my father [a local lawyer] and mother [a writer and teacher] knew everybody in town and we were just part of a very tight-knit community,” Kendrick said. “Part of what drew me to UVA when I was a student was it felt like it was a real community — it felt like a place where you could put down roots.”

Twenty-one years later, Kendrick has deep roots with UVA Law, including 16 years as a professor focused on free speech and torts, and four years serving as the Law School’s vice dean under her predecessor and mentor, Risa Goluboff.

On this Day 1, she will be thinking about how to help the Law School evolve into the future — how to adapt to the proliferation of artificial intelligence and other changes in technology, as well as how to prepare students for an evolving legal profession and preserve the UVA Law community’s unique collegiality in a time of increased polarization.

“We are part of a continuous community of alumni and students — a neighborhood — and part of a larger professional community for life,” she said. “There are many events and factors outside our school that we cannot control, but we can control how we treat each other.

“I think we are the best-run law school in the country, and I look forward to working with my staff colleagues who make that the case,” Kendrick said. “I want this to stay the best place I’ve ever worked, and I think there are a lot of people who feel this is a really special community, both among students and among faculty and staff.”

When the Class of 2027 arrives for their own first day in August, she plans to make sure they know that “anything you can think about doing, we offer here.”

“Students are all going to go out and do great things, and our job as an institution is to get you working together and preparing you to do great things.”

Kendrick’s expertise in English literature gave her a strong grounding in an area that continues to be a flashpoint for higher education: freedom of speech. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on John Milton, whose writings on press freedom contributed to her interest in free expression.

“In an era of largely unquestioned government control, Milton argued that censorship is actually the easy way out: grappling with ideas is hard work, and it is supposed to be,” Kendrick said. “We protect expression not because all ideas are created equal, but because they are not. Free inquiry enables us to identify promising ideas and expose weak ones. Ignoring or suppressing troubling ideas does neither of those.”

Her interest in torts was stoked by a tort theory class with Professors Kenneth S. Abraham and Vincent Blasi, who is now at Columbia Law School. Among the 10 students in the class were Kendrick, her future husband and UVA colleague Professor Micah Schwartzman ’05, future UVA colleague Professor Charles Barzun ’05 and Daniel Bress ’05, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Another classmate, U.S. Attorney Chris Kavanaugh ’06, took classes alongside her and has remained a close friend, along with his spouse, Jasmine Yoon ’06, who was recently confirmed as a district court Judge for the Western District of Virginia.

“From the moment I met her in 2003 and in the 21 years since, she has always been a person of empathy, humility and intellect,” Kavanaugh said. She “genuinely cares about those around her and the UVA Law community, and on top of all that, she’s a commissioned Kentucky Colonel.” (The honor is the highest bestowed by the state’s governor and given for outstanding service to the community, state and nation.)

Before becoming dean, she served as faculty director of the school’s Center for the First Amendment, which elevates and promotes faculty scholarship in that field. She has written or co-authored at least 22 articles, chapters or essays on free speech.

She also served as a special adviser to the University’s provost regarding free expression and inquiry, and in 2021 chaired the committee that produced the University’s Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry, which was endorsed by President Jim Ryan ’92 and adopted by the Board of Visitors.

Kendrick is a member of the American Law Institute, serving as an adviser to the defamation and privacy portion of ALI’s “Restatement of the Law Third, Torts,” and is a co-author of a leading torts casebook, “Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress.” She has also written or co-authored several articles, chapters or essays on various aspects of tort law.

In introducing Kendrick to UVA Law alumni on Reunions weekend, Goluboff noted the key roles Kendrick has played during Goluboff’s tenure as dean, both officially and unofficially.

“I relied on Leslie's wise counsel, razor-sharp mind, and friendship throughout my deanship. She helped steer the law school through the challenges of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence of Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, and the COVID pandemic,” Goluboff said. “She was the primary academic officer who led our efforts to move operations online in eight days in the spring of 2020 and then into a hybrid format for the following school year. There is no one I would rather be in a foxhole with than Leslie Kendrick.”

Together, their two deanships will make up just part of the history of UVA Law, which is not lost on Kendrick, who chose UVA for its sense of family and community as much as its history.

“We have a great, great institution here, and I see myself as someone who can steward that for the next few years, to continue to make it great, to think of new ways to adapt it to everything that’s changing about the world,” Kendrick said. “But I’m here for a short time in the 200-year history of this institution, and I want to leave it better and perpetuate that community we have here.”