Dr. Lolita Buckner Inniss Named University Distinguished Professor

Dr. Lolita Buckner Inniss has been named University Distinguished Professor, an honor reserved for SMU faculty members who demonstrate the highest levels of academic achievement. Dr. Inniss is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the Dedman School of Law.

Professors are awarded the honor based on recommendations from their deans and endorsed by the Office of the Provost. The University Distinguished Professorships were created in 1982 by SMU’s Board of Trustees to celebrate outstanding faculty members, who receive cash awards and are appointed for a five-year rolling term.

Dr. Inniss joined SMU Dedman School of Law in the summer of 2017, quickly demonstrating her expertise in legal history, critical race theory, gender and the law, and real property law. Her latest research project concerns the intersection of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements and her work is widely cited by scholars, legal practitioners and members of the news media.

In addition to serving as Dedman Law’s Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, she is a Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow.

Dr. Inniss teaches a broad range of courses, including property law, comparative racism and the law, critical race theory and real estate transactions. She is a highly regarded scholar with a prominent national and international voice in her fields. She was just elected to membership in the prestigious American Law Institute. The Center for Compassionate Leadership has recently named her book The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson as one of five books white leaders should read on systemic racism along with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and others. Read more about it here. She has published over two dozen journal articles in prominent law school journals such as Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, and the University of Texas, and in peer-reviewed journals. She has also published several book chapters and book reviews, along with scores of blog articles that have themselves been widely noted and cited. Much of her scholarly work has broken new ground and challenged existing paradigms via interdisciplinary approaches that sharpen and enlarge legal methodologies.

She has expanded her research influence at SMU through connections with faculty in other schools and departments, most notably through co-organizing the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute Research Cluster: “New Feminist Discourses and Social Change” and through membership in the Institute’s “Preparing for the Second Century of Historical Inquiry about the Hilltop” Research Cluster.

Dr. Inniss received her A.B. from Princeton University, where she majored in Romance Languages and Literature with certifications (minors) in African American and Latin American Studies. She earned her J.D. from UCLA where she was an editor of the National Black Law Journal, and a Moot Court Honors Participant. She holds an LL.M. with Distinction and a Ph.D. in law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Canada, where she won the Mary Jane Mossman Award for Work in Feminist Legal Theory and the Harley D. Hallett Award, and was a Peter Hogg Scholar and a Graduate Associate of the Institute of Feminist Legal Studies. Prior to joining SMU, Professor Inniss was tenured and achieved the rank of full professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University, where she held the Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker and Hostetler Chair in Law. She also previously held the Hamilton College Elihu Root Peace Fund Visiting Professorship in Women's Studies, a distinguished visiting chair, and was also a fellow of the New York University-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Memory Project in Paris, France.