Jasmine Gonzales Rose Named Associate Dean for Equity, Justice & Engagement
Gonzales Rose brings 15 years of experience teaching and values-based mission-driven leadership to the role.
Photo by Tami Nguyen
Jasmine Gonzales Rose Named Associate Dean for Equity, Justice & Engagement
Gonzales Rose brings 15 years of experience teaching and values-based mission-driven leadership to the role.
BU Law Professor Jasmine Gonzales Rose, a leading critical race theorist who has taught evidence, criminal law, civil procedure, and courses on race, racism, and the law has been named associate dean for equity, justice & engagement.
In this role, Associate Dean Gonzales Rose will propose faculty and student recruitment and retention initiatives to enhance representation of faculty and students from underrepresented groups; provide inclusive pedagogy and classroom climate trainings for faculty and students; and develop intellectual life and academic enrichment programing designed to foster an open and vibrant community.
In addition, Associate Dean Gonzales Rose will continue to oversee the ASPIRE (Antiracist Scholars for Progress, Innovation, and Racial Equity) Program. She will also develop programming to maintain compliance with the new American Bar Association Standard 303(c), which mandates that law schools provide education around bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.
“I’m very excited and honored to be named to this role,” says Gonzales Rose, who previously led legal research and policy projects at the BU Center for Antiracist Research. “I’m thrilled to be able to use my 15 years of law teaching, thinking as an equality scholar, and values-based mission-driven leadership experience to enhance our antiracist, anti-bias, and cross-cultural competence learning at BU Law. Dean Onwuachi-Willig was instrumental in the passing of this ABA Standard, and I want BU Law to continue to be a national model for excellence, equity, and antiracism.”
Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig created the role of associate dean for equity, justice & engagement in 2017 to be a key partner in developing and implementing initiatives that provide faculty and staff with education and training that will assist them in offering effective education to all BU Law students. Associate Dean Gonzales Rose takes the title over from Associate Professor and Associate Dean for the Fineman & Pappas Law Libraries Ron Wheeler. Before Professor Wheeler, Professor and Howard Zhang Faculty Research Scholar Fred Tung; Professor, Law Alumni Scholar, and current Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Anna di Robilant; and former Professor Khiara Bridges (now at Berkeley Law) served in the role.
I want every student at BU Law not only to feel like they belong despite their backgrounds, identities, and ideologies, but because of the rich diversity of their backgrounds, identities, and ideologies.
“My goals as associate dean for equity, justice, and engagement are to support our learning and teaching communities in embracing core values of the legal profession, which include excellence, civility, diversity, inclusion, equity, access, and justice,” Gonzales Rose says. “I want every student at BU Law not only to feel like they belong despite their backgrounds, identities, and ideologies, but because of the rich diversity of their backgrounds, identities, and ideologies.”
Associate Dean Gonzales Rose’s scholarship examines the intersections of racism and linguicism with juries and evidence. She is a leading criticalist voice on evidence law and juror language disenfranchisement. Prior to joining the faculty of Boston University in 2020, she was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law for nearly a decade. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor-in-chief of the Harvard Latinx Law Review and a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She clerked for Judge Héctor M. Laffitte of the US District Court for Puerto Rico and Judge Damon J. Keith of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She has worked for a variety of nonprofit and governmental organizations on issues of civil and human rights, including serving on the founding board of directors of the Abolitionist Law Center which was started by her former students. She is a member of the Supreme Judicial Court Advisory Committee on Massachusetts Evidence Law and was elected to the American Law Institute in 2023.
“Two of the core values around which I have centered my deanship are Excellence and Equity, and particularly, the intersection of the two,” Dean Onwuachi-Willig says. “I am committed to the fundamental proposition that a diverse and welcoming environment is essential to—even constitutive of—an excellent academic environment that prepares the next generation of impactful legal professionals and that produces research and scholarship that matter. Professor Gonzales Rose’s service as associate dean of equity, justice & engagement is an important step in BU Law’s evolution towards truly living out these core values.”
