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Lea VanderVelde is the Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. She writes in the fields of employment law, property law, legal history and constitutional law.
Her research in the areas of labor and property highlights the nature of legal change over time. She draws her inspiration from history, cross-cultural observation, and legal realism. Her trio of articles, published in the Yale and Stanford law journals, demonstrate the significance of gender in the historical development of rules in contracts, torts, and constitutional litigation respectively. Other articles have explored cultural patterns in land use law and the 13th Amendment and law of slavery. In search of cultural comparisons, she has visited South Africa and the Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtse River in China, Mount Koya and Kyoto, Japan and Jaipur, India where she has been working with Kailash Satyarthi and an organization called the Global March to End Child Slavery.
Her new courses include Property and Liberty, the Law of the Frontier, 1820-1857, and Design of Law.
She is at work on a new case book called Property and Liberty: Laws and Norms for Aspen Kluwers Press. She contributed the land use, zoning, and constitutional takings chapters to the 4th and 5th editions of Cases and Materials in Property Law, by Casner, Leach, French and other others. Her treatise in Employment Law, with Rothstein, Craver, Shoben, and Schroeder was published in 1994.
Her current book projects include Slaves on the Frontier: the background story of the Dred Scott case and Redemption Songs: How Slaves Sued for Freedom in St. Louis Courts. She played a role in the discovery of almost 300 freedom suits brought by slaves in the St. Louis courts. Those files have now been placed on the web by Washington University-St. Louis. An article describing her role in the discovery of these cases can be found in the L.A. Times, March 18, 2003. She is also at work on a monograph entitled, The Master Narrative of 19th Century Law, which explores how master-servant law resisted change in the 19th century to continue to be relevant in modern employment relations.
She regularly spends spring semester in Europe, where she teaches American law and studies the changing dynamic of labor regulation and labor mobility in the path of European integration and expansion. Professor VanderVelde is a regular visitor at the the Juridicum of the University of Vienna. She has also taught at Yale Law School and the University of Pennsylvania.
She is a member of the Wisconsin bar and the American Law Institute. She has been the University’s Faculty Scholar and Global Scholar in various years.
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