Angela M. Banks

Angela M. Banks (Harvard, J.D., Oxford, M.Litt, Spelman, B.A.) is a legal scholar who specializes in membership and belonging in democratic societies. Her research explores this topic in the areas of immigration, citizenship, law school faculty hiring and retention practices, and law school curriculum. She is the Vice Dean and Charles J. Merriam Distinguished Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Civic Education in the Age of Mass Migration: Implications for Theory and Practice and her legal scholarship has appeared in leading American law review journals.

Prior to joining the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law faculty, Professor Banks was a Professor of Law at William & Mary School of Law.  She has also served as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School, a legal advisor to Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal; an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC (now WilmerHale); and a law clerk for Judge Carlos F. Lucero of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. 

Professor Banks is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard International Law Journal. Prior to attending law school Professor Banks received a Master of Letters degree in sociology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. in sociology from Spelman College summa cum laude.