H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.
John Hope Franklin Research Scholar
Professor of Law

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 at the Maurer School 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 in the spring 2019 semester. During the 2019-2020 academic year he served as a visiting professor of law at the University of Virginia.

Lovelace’s work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law. He has published articles in journals including the Law and History Review, American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History, and his article, “William Worthy's Passport,” was selected for the 2015 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop. His forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge University Press), examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development 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 2015, he received the Indiana University Trustees’ Teaching Award. During the 2015-2016 academic year, he served as a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. His scholarship has also received support from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, Indiana University New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program, and John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation.

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

Before joining the Indiana Law faculty, Lovelace served as the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Race and Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. The Center for the Study of Race and Law provides opportunities for students, scholars, practitioners and community members to examine and exchange ideas related to race and law through lectures, symposia and scholarship.

A photo of H. Timothy Lovelace

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