UCLA School of Law Distinguished Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has been named the recipient of the 2021 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Women in Legal Education.

The award is presented each year to “honor an individual who has had a distinguished career of teaching, service, and scholarship for at least 20 years. The recipient should be someone who has impacted women, the legal community, the academy, and the issues that affect women through mentoring, writing, speaking, activism, and by providing opportunities to others.”

Among the most widely cited scholars in the country, Crenshaw has been a preeminent leader in legal scholarship and critical race theory for more than three decades, having originated the concept of intersectionality in her landmark 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” A member of the UCLA Law faculty since 1986, she co-founded the Critical Race Studies program in 2000 and holds the Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights.

Crenshaw also serves as the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and is a co-founder and the executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She is renowned for developing and promoting the #SayHerName campaign opposing police brutality against Black women, hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters! and the webinar series Under the Blacklight, and is a columnist for The New Republic.

She is the ninth recipient of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education’s lifetime achievement award, which was first presented to Ginsburg in 2013 and thereafter named for the celebrated U.S. Supreme Court justice.