Leslie Culver joined the faculty at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law on July 1, 2020. Professor Culver is an experienced Professor of Legal Writing. As an avid lover of all forms of writing since her youth, Professor Culver—after years in law practice—found her calling in teaching law students to develop their legal writing, research, and oral advocacy skills through an elevated lens of identity formation. This focus on identity formation is fueled by her scholarly interest. 

 

She arrived at Utah after spending two years as a Visiting Professor of Lawyering Skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. At UCI, Professor Culver taught in the first year Lawyering Skills program and created an upper level seminar titled “Identity, Power & Professional Responsibility.” Prior to UCI, Professor Culver was a faculty member at California Western School of Law for eleven years, where she taught in the first year Legal Skills program.  She also taught the “Legal Scholarship Training Seminar,” “Women in the Law,” and “Race & the Law,” and served as the Director of A.I.M. for Law, a diversity pipeline program for underrepresented college students.  In addition to teaching and serving as the director of a program, Professor Culver was the faculty advisor to the Black Law Student Association and the Christian Legal Society. Prior to California Western, she was an Associate Professor at Saint Louis University School of Law.

 

Her research agenda is driven foremost by her Christian faith in equality among all human beings and doctrinally lies at the intersection of race and ethnicity discourse and social science disciplines. Her narrow focus is on the reality of identity strategies for traditionally marginalized groups to navigate their identity in a homogeneous legal profession. Broadly, her work focuses on “conscious identity performance” and cultural awareness—and how they overlap in every individual and prevent access toward diversity, inclusion, and equity within the legal profession. She has presented and published widely in this area and is passionate about empowering all her students to be culturally conscious attorneys in this racial era through expansive identity performance tools. Professor Culver’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Nevada Law Journal, San Diego Law Review, the Journal of Legal Education, the Journal of Gender & Justice, amongst others.