Matthew Patrick Shaw's scholarship focuses on the intersection of federal law and educational policy and explores education rights and regulations through critical legal history, doctrinal analysis and econometric policy studies. Professor Shaw joined the law faculty in 2022. He had previously served on the faculty of Vanderbilt Peabody College since fall 2017, having joined Peabody as an assistant professor of public policy and education after completing his doctorate in education at Harvard University and a two-year fellowship with the American Bar Foundation and Law and Society Association. After earning his law degree in Columbia Law School in 2005, he was a law clerk for then-Chief Judge W. Louis Sands of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia before practicing law in Atlanta.
Shaw received the Education Law Association's Steven S. Goldberg Award, which recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of education law, in fall 2023 for his 2022 Chicago Law Review article, "The Public Right to Education." His current projects investigate the constitutional status of rights to education across the K-20 lifecycle and the rights of vulnerable and marginalized members of the education ecology, including undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ school-aged youth, and historically Black K-12 and higher-educational spaces.
Education as property, educational institutions and dilemmas of difference, empirical legal studies, federal law and educational policy, law and society, race and the law