Brittany Farr will join NYU Law as an assistant professor of law on June 1, Dean Trevor Morrison announced this month.
Farr comes to NYU Law from the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, where she has been a Sharswood Fellow and Lecturer in Law. An expert on race and private law, Farr has focused her recent scholarship on examining how marginalized populations function in legal systems hostile to them. Her current works in progress, Unfreedom and Contract and Breach by Violence, are concerned with the relationship between African Americans—both freed and enslaved—and contract law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
“Brittany is an insightful interdisciplinary scholar, whose innovative research at the intersection of race and private law is deeply illuminating,” says Morrison. “We are thrilled to welcome her to our faculty.”
Farr earned her JD from Yale Law School in 2019, where she was awarded an Earl Warren Scholarship by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for her commitment to racial justice. At Yale, Farr co-authored a policy report on banking and mental health through Yale’s Ludwig Center for Community and Economic Development and a policy report on gender and mass incarceration through the Essie Justice Group, a nonprofit group that focuses on the impact of mass incarceration on women and gender-nonconforming individuals.
Before law school, Farr received a Masters and a PhD from the University of Southern California in Communications. A chapter from Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction: The Black Maternal Body in US Law, Media, and Policy, Farr’s PhD dissertation, was awarded the Louise Kerckhoff Prize for Best Graduate Paper from USC’s Center for Feminist Research. In 2010, she earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude from Harvard College in folklore and mythology.
Posted April 18, 2022.