Professor Mildred Robinson Is Retiring After 47 Years of Teaching in Higher Education

Mildred Robinson, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law whose scholarship and community service have emphasized equity, will retire this spring after almost 35 years on the faculty. Professor Robinson, who specializes in tax law, was the law school’s first African American female tenured professor. She was hired with tenure in 1985 from Florida State University. Overall, Professor Robinson has been teaching in higher education for 47 years.

Before she began her career as a law school professor. Robinson worked for IBM as a systems engineer and later as a marketing executive. After completing her legal training, Robinson worked for a year as director of admissions and assistant dean at Boston University.

In addition to teaching, Professor Robinson was a member of the board of visitors for the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah from 1993 to 1996. She served as a member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools from 2000 to 2003.

While Professor Robinson has written mostly about tax and financial issues, she has said her proudest academic moment may be when she “went off script” to work on the book Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which she co-edited.

Professor Robinson is a graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She earned a juris doctorate at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree in tax law from Harvard Law School