Lisa Schultz Bressman has been named associate dean for academic affairs, with responsibility for overseeing Vanderbilt Law School’s academic program. In that role, Bressman will work closely with Dean Chris Guthrie to manage the Law School’s curriculum and academic life.
Bressman is a renowned scholar of administrative law and statutory interpretation She previously served in the same position from 2010 to 2016.
“Lisa Bressman is a gifted scholar of administrative law and also a gifted administrator who made important contributions to the academic life of the law school during her prior terms as associate dean for academic affairs, and I am grateful to be working with her again in this crucial role,” said Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
Bressman was ranked among the top 10 most-cited scholars in the area of public law for the period from 2013 to 2017 in the Leiter Score scholarly impact rankings. Her most recent work includes a 2021 article, “Chevron Is a Phoenix,” co-authored with VLS colleague Kevin Stack, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, and a 2020 essay, “What SEILA Law Says about Chief Justice Roberts’ View of the Administrative State,” published in 2020 in the University of Chicago Law Review Online.
Bressman has co-authored, with Vanderbilt colleagues Edward Rubin and Kevin Stack, The Regulatory State, now in its third edition, a course book designed to teach statutes and regulations to students, particularly in the first year of law school. Before her prior service as associate dean for academic affairs, she was co-director of Vanderbilt’s Regulatory Program from 2006 to 2010.
She joined the Vanderbilt law faculty in 1998 after working in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and serving as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge José A. Cabranes when he was Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Connecticut. She teaches Administrative Law, Regulatory State and Behind the Curtain of the Supreme Court seminar.