Vinay Harpalani

Vinay Harpalani is Associate Professor of Law and teaches Constitutional Law (I & II), Civil Procedure (I & II), and Employment Discrimination. Prior to joining the faculty of Savannah Law School in August 2014, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology (2012-14), where he taught Legal Writing (I & II) and Critical Race Theory. Professor Harpalani was also the inaugural academic fellow at the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, Seattle University School of Law (2010-12), where he taught seminar courses in education law and constitutional law; and the Derrick Bell Fellow at New York University (NYU) School of Law (2009-10), where he co-taught constitutional law courses with the late Professor Derrick Bell.

Professor Harpalani’s scholarship focuses on race, education, and constitutional law, examining legal, social, and political dimensions of racial identity. He has authored several law review articles on race-conscious university admissions and is frequently invited to comment and speak about the topic. His article, “Diversity Within Racial Groups and the Constitutionality of Race-Conscious Admissions,” which was published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, was cited in several amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, No. 14-981 (2015). Additionally, Professor Harpalani’s article “DesiCrit: Theorizing the Racial Ambiguity of South Asian Americans,” which was published in the NYU Annual Survey of American Law issue dedicated to Professor Derrick Bell, is the most comprehensive scholarly source on the racial classification of South Asian Americans (peoples in the U.S. whose ancestry derives from the Indian subcontinent), and is also a pathbreaking work on the emerging topic of racial ambiguity.

Professor Harpalani graduated from NYU School of Law in 2009, where he served as an articles editor for the New York University Law Review, an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, and a Derrick A. Bell Jr. Public Service Scholar. At NYU, he won the Gary E. Moncrieffe Award for “outstanding student in Racism and Law” and received a Vanderbilt Medal for “outstanding contributions to the school of law.” Prior to law school, Professor Harpalani earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and also served as a lecturer at Penn.