Professor Driver Receives The Steven S. Goldberg Award

Yale Law School Professor Justin Driver has recently been awarded The Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law for his book, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. The award is given annually by the Education Law Association to a singular author whose scholarly excellence impacts education law. Professor Driver joins distinguished company with past recipients such as: Goodwin Liu ’98, now Justice on the California Supreme Court, Martha L. Minow ’79, former dean of Harvard Law School, and James E. Ryan, now President of the University of Virginia.

Professor Driver’s book, The Schoolhouse Gate, analyzes the intersection of two important institutions of the United States: public schools and the Supreme Court. In arguing that neither of the aforementioned institutions can be understood without contemplating the other, Professor Driver explains and defends why public schools are the nation’s most vital sites of constitutional interpretation. By including matters such as freedom of speech, due process, equal protection, criminal procedure, and others, Professor Driver’s work aims to reenergize education law and challenge dominant perceptions of the Supreme Court’s role in American society.

Professor Driver arrived at Yale Law School in 2019 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law. Driver is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school), and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, Driver clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

While receiving The Steven S. Goldberg Award is the most recent accolade for his debut book, The Schoolhouse Gate has previously been selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was a finalist for both the Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. The book received numerous reviews in the nation’s leading legal journals – including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review – and has already been cited by federal judges in two of the most momentous students’ rights decisions of recent vintage.  

The Education Law Association is an institution committed to connecting and informing individuals across the field of education as legal issues and policy changes shift the working landscape of American education. To learn more about the group and the Steven S. Goldberg Award, please visit their website.