Joy Milligan

Joy Milligan is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She studies the intersection of law and inequality, with a particular focus on race-based economic inequality. Her scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing on social science theory and methods, and has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, and Journal of Legal Education. Her current work examines the legal and political struggles over federal administrators’ long-term role in extending racial segregation. 

Before entering academia, Milligan practiced civil rights law at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she was a Skadden Fellow, and clerked for Judge A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Milligan is a member of the state bars of California and New York. She holds a BA in social studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard-Radcliffe and an MPA from Princeton University. She graduated magna cum laude from NYU Law School, where she was a Furman Scholar and Fellow and an articles editor of the NYU Law Review. She also earned a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on race, politics, and legal history. Before attending law school, Milligan spent several years founding a nonprofit bicycle recycling project in the northwest Dominican Republic.