Meeting the Moment

Rodríguez aims to bolster the Law School as an institution for innovative scholarship, exploration of ideas, and the production of knowledge. 

“My primary objective is to sustain Yale Law School as the vibrant intellectual and academic institution it has always been, but to push us all to think about the kind of law school we should be, given our present moment and the demands of the future,” said Rodríguez. 

Rodríguez said faculty hiring will play a critical role in sustaining and adapting the Law School’s singular academic environment and will be one of her highest priorities as dean. She emphasized that academic hiring decisions will be a collective, faculty-wide effort to nurture the path-breaking and influential scholarship that has become a hallmark of the Law School. 

“Maintaining our tradition of interdisciplinary study will be really important,” said Rodríguez. “We need to encompass diverse fields and methodologies and sustain work that is timeless and poses challenging new questions.” 

Rodríguez said her own experience with faculty mentors during her time as a law student played an important role in shaping her career and scholarly pursuits, and she hopes to foster an academic community that continues to nurture those bonds for generations to come. 

“My professors at the Law School showed me the virtue and beauty of the life of the mind and helped me to see that I could be a legal scholar who played a role in the world at large,” said Rodríguez. “This sort of mentorship should be a defining feature of the Law School.”

A leading scholar of constitutional, administrative, and immigration law, Rodríguez’s commitment to the rule of law and public service has been a throughline of her career in academia and the federal government. 

Since graduating from the Law School, Rodríguez’s positions have included clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court, teaching as a member of the NYU School of Law faculty, serving as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, and co-chairing the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Much of her work has focused on presidential power and the structures and functions of the executive branch. Her book “The President and Immigration Law” (with Adam Cox) charts the long history of presidential influence over immigration policymaking and analyzes its implications for the separation of powers and the rights and status of noncitizens in the American polity. Her recent scholarship also includes a series of empirically informed papers on accountability and policymaking within administrative agencies and their relationship to democratic governance, set against the backdrop of monumental changes in administrative law. In all of her work, she explores how institutions channel conflict and pluralism, enabling us to live in disagreement. 

Her scholarly and professional background, Rodríguez said, will inform how she approaches the demands of the present moment as a leader in higher education. 

“The moment demands a university and a profession that are alive to the challenges of today’s world,” she said, noting specifically the erosion of democratic norms and the instability and fragility of many of our legal and governing institutions, as well as the rapid pace of technological change. Rodríguez is committed to thinking intentionally and creatively about how the Law School will rise to these challenges. 

“I believe in the importance of the university; I believe in the importance of scholarship and teaching; and I believe in the talent, vision, and commitment of our students, faculty, and alums,” she emphasized. “To have the chance to lead Yale Law School in this moment of change and uncertainty is an honor and challenge of a lifetime.”