Colin Crawford

Dean and Professor of Law

(501) 916-5400 | Room 204D
Email: [email protected]

Curriculum Vitae

Colin Crawford was appointed Dean and Professor of Law in July 2023, having previously served as dean in law schools in Louisville, Kentucky and San Francisco, California.

Prior to becoming an academic administrator, Dean Crawford was a tenured member of the faculty at Tulane University, where he served as the law school’s Robert C. Cudd Professor of Environmental Law and was the Executive Director of the Payson Center for International Development, and an affiliated faculty member of the university’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Before that he was, among other roles, a tenured member of the faculty at the Georgia State University College of Law, where he founded and co-directed the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth. While at Georgia State, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the recipient of a four-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve the teaching of environmental law in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the classroom, Dean Crawford teaches Real Property Law and has taught a wide range of land use and environmental law courses, often with a comparative and international focus. He has also designed and directed a wide range of foreign study programs in a number of countries, including Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and Switzerland. Dean Crawford’s scholarly focus concentrates in areas related to his teaching, and specifically explores questions of environmental and land use justice, often from a comparative or international perspective.

Dean Crawford, who speaks and writes in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English,  has visited, taught and conducted research at a number of law schools and advanced study institutes, including stints at Carlos III University School of Law (Madrid, Spain- as holder of the Santander Chair of Excellence), Chuo University (Tokyo, Japan), Bucerius Law School (Hamburg, Germany- as the Max Cade Visiting Professor), Institute for Applied Economics (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), National School of Public Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), University of the Andes (Bogota, Colombia), and the University of Lisbon School of Law (Lisbon, Portugal).

Dean Crawford received his B.A. in History from Columbia University (New York, N.Y.) an M.A. from Cambridge University (Cambridge, U.K.), and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.