Dear Tulane Community:
We are pleased to announce that Sally Brown Richardson, a widely respected scholar of property rights and vice dean for Academic Affairs at Tulane School of Law, has accepted appointment as interim dean of the law school. She will begin her new post on July 1, after David Meyer, dean of Tulane Law School and the Mitchell Franklin Professor of Law, steps down to assume the role of dean and president of Brooklyn Law School.
Sally, the A.D. Freeman Professor of Civil Law, has served as the law school’s vice dean since 2020, leading students and faculty through the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant changes in the delivery of teaching law it prompted. During the 2020 academic year, in her first year as vice dean, she prepared the graduating class to take the Louisiana Bar Exam in an online format, while also preparing classroom space in response to the pandemic, reconfiguring offices for newly hired faculty and developing plans for hybrid instruction.
Everyone who has had the opportunity to work with Sally knows that in addition to being a renowned legal scholar and a beloved teacher and mentor, she is a very smart, thoughtful administrator with deep insights into the academic legal world, and with a true dedication to, and ambition for, Tulane’s School of Law. We are fortunate that she is willing to take on the demanding and challenging role of interim dean and look forward to working with her to ensure that the law school continues to thrive during this period of transition.
Sally specializes in property law, community property law and comparative private law. Her scholarship and teaching focus on modernizing property doctrines for greater effectiveness and efficiency. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the nation’s most influential legal reform association and serves as parliamentarian of the University Senate.
Sally serves on the executive board for both the Association of Law, Property and Society and the American Society of Comparative Law. She also is an active member of the Louisiana State Law Institute, serving on its Council and as the Reporter for the Institute’s Property Committee. She is currently serving as a Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s project to create a new statutory plan that will allow those who share ownership of property more easily transact their co-owned property.
Sally’s work has been published in the American Journal of Comparative Law, University of Houston Law Review, Tennessee Law Review, Tulane Law Review and the Louisiana Law Review. She is the author of the textbook Community Property in the United States (Carolina Academic Press 2015). Her article "Reframing Ameliorative Waste" was selected for the 2015 Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum.
Outside of her talents as a scholar, Sally is known for her engaging demeanor in the classroom and a gift for bringing often arcane laws to life. In 2019, she received Tulane University’s highest teaching honor – the President’s Award for Excellence in Professional and Graduate Teaching. Four years earlier, the graduating class had selected her to receive the law school’s top teaching award, the Felix Frankfurter Award for Distinguished Teaching. She also was named the Gordon Gamm Scholar in 2015, an award for early-career professors.
Before joining the Tulane Law faculty, Sally practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom in Washington, D.C. She clerked for Judge W. Eugene Davis on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and before that worked as deputy communications director for then-U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu.
Training tomorrow’s legal scholars is foundational to our democracy. We are grateful to have an administrator and legal mind of Sally’s caliber step into this critical role. She offers a strong presence and steady hand at the helm of one of the greatest law schools in the country.
Michael A. Fitts
President
Robin Forman
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
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