Joy Milligan is a professor of law at the University of Virginia Law School, where she studies the intersection of law and inequality, with a focus on race-based economic inequality. Prior, she taught civil rights, anti-discrimination law, civil procedure, and critical theories of law at the University of California, Berkeley. Milligan’s work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, and the Journal of Legal Education. Her current focus is on federal administrators’ long-term role in extending racial segregation.

Before entering academia, Milligan practiced civil rights law at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she was a Skadden Fellow, and she clerked for the Hon. A. Wallace Tashima, of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A member of the state bars of California and New York, Milligan received a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from University of California, Berkeley (2018) and a JD from New York University Law School (2006), where she was a Furman Scholar and an editor of the NYU Law Review. She received her MPA from Princeton University (2003) and AB from Harvard-Radcliffe (1998).