Board Member, MPI
Dean, Yale Law School
Cristina M. Rodríguez is Dean of Yale Law School, which she joined as Professor of Law in 2013, and is faculty Co-Director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership.
From 2011-13, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and from 2004-12 she was on the faculty at the New York University School of Law. Professor Rodriguez also has been the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Henry L. Stimson Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is a member of the American Law Institute, and a past member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Rodriguez’s fields of research and teaching include immigration law and policy; constitutional law and theory; and administrative law and process and legislation. Before entering academia, she served as a law clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
She earned a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1995, a Master of Letters in Modern History in 1998 from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2000, where she was an Articles Editor on the Yale Law Journal and a co-recipient of the Benjamin Scharps Prize for the best paper written by a third-year student.