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H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2020 from Indiana University, where he was a professor of law and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. He previously taught at Duke Law as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History. Lovelace has also served as a visiting professor of law at the University of Virginia and New York University and a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. 

 

Lovelace’s scholarship examines the relationships between the civil rights movement and international human rights law as well as the relationships between corporate governance and social justice movements. His work has appeared or will appear in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and UCLA Law Review, as well as leading historical journals including Law and History Review, the Journal of American History, and the American Journal of Legal History. His research has received support from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, and his co-authored article, “Corporate Racial Responsibility,” was named one of the Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2024 by the Corporate Practice Commentator. Lovelace’s forthcoming book, The World Is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge University Press), explores how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the drafting of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

 

Lovelace teaches American legal history, constitutional law, and race and the law. In 2026, he received the Duke Bar Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award. While a faculty member at Indiana, he received the Indiana University Trustees’ Teaching Award. Lovelace is also active in the legal history community and currently serves as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Legal History and on the Board of Trustees of the American Society for Legal History.

 

Lovelace earned his J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. During law school, he was an Oliver Hill Scholar, the recipient of the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize, and winner of the Bracewell & Patterson LLP Best Oralist Award. As a doctoral student in history, he was a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellow and the inaugural Armstead L. Robinson Fellow of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies.