Adrienne Davis

Adrienne Davis is the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law at Washington University. She holds courtesy academic appointments in the Departments of African and African-American Studies; History; Sociology; and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, all in the College of Arts & Sciences. She served for a decade as the University’s Vice Provost, chairing numerous searches and task forces; helping design infrastructure to support diversity, equity, inclusion, and academic excellence; and serving as the founding Director of the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, which engages faculty and students across Washington University’s seven schools to study how race and ethnicity are integral to the most complex and challenging issues of our time.

As a teacher and scholar Davis is a feminist and critical race theorist who focuses on “the law of daily life,” or how law regulates and affects people’s daily interactions, decisions, and identities. She has written extensively on the gendered and private law dimensions of American slavery, the legal regulation of intimacy in its myriad forms, and theories of justice and reparations. She has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the California Law Review, as well as numerous other articles and book chapters. She is the co-editor of the books, Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital and Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America. She is currently working on projects on race and art markets and how language facilitates or impedes justice.

At Washington University Davis has received the University’s 2020 Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award and 2016 Founders Day Distinguished Faculty Award as well as the 2019 Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Exceptional Service to Arts & Sciences. She also is the past recipient of a Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Davis teaches Trusts & Estates, Contracts, Critical Race Theory, and a variety of legal theory seminars, including ones on Slavery & the Law and Feminist Legal Theory. Student groups have recognized her as the Voice of the Faculty (commencement speaker, 2023); Outlaw (Washington University School of Law LGBT association), President’s Award for Contributions to LGBTQ Diversity & Inclusion (2015); and with the Black Law Student Association Inaugural President’s Award (2014). At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill she received the law school’s Frederick B. McCall Award for Teaching Excellence.

Davis is active in her professional associations. She is currently a member of the AALS Executive Committee for the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. She is a past Chair of the Law & Humanities Section of the American Association of Law Schools and served on the organization’s Membership Review Committee. She has been a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians for many years, and for two years chaired the Littleton-Griswold Prize Committee of the American Historical Association.

Outside of work, Davis is passionate about the arts and the St. Louis region and embraces opportunities to combine her two loves. She has served on multiple cultural boards of directors and trustees, including the St. Louis Art Museum, Opera Theatre St. Louis, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Fashion Fund St. Louis, the St. Louis Visionary Awards, Laumeier Sculpture Park, and December Literary Magazine. For two years she chaired the Arts Facet of the St. Louis Chapter of the Links, Inc. Davis has been honored as a St. Louis Visionary Awards Major Contributor to the Arts award (2025); St. Louis Business Journal Diverse Business Leader (2020); St. Louis Woman of Achievement for Arts Advocacy (2017); Women’s Justice Award, Legal Scholar (2013); and a St. Louis Magazine Innovator (2011).

Davis earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University where she served on the Executive Committee of the Yale Law Journal.