LESLIE CULVER

Leslie Culver joined the faculty at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in the Fall of 2020 after a two-year visitorship with UIC School of Law (Irvine). Professor Culver brings her expertise in teaching legal writing from a rhetorical foundation to the College of Law’s Legal Methods program. She also teaches courses related to her other areas of expertise in identity performance and cultural awareness.

 

Professor Culver’s research centers on conscious identity performance in legal education and the legal profession. Driven foremost by her Christian faith rooted in equality and human dignity, her works spans two doctrinal areas. First, within Law & Literature, she uses contemporary argumentation theories and rhetoric to explore how identity performance intersects with legal reasoning. Second, within Law & Communication, she combines interdisciplinary theories from law, communication, and anthropology to examine identity performance within the legal profession. She is the first to bring co-cultural communication theory into the legal profession and has coined the term "conscious identity performance" because of this work.

 

Her scholarship has appeared or will appear in, among other publications, Seton Hall Law Review, Utah Law Review, Nevada Law Journal, The Regulatory Review (University of Pennsylvania), Journal of Legal Education, San Diego Law Review, Women’s Rights Law Reporter (Rutgers), Journal of Gender, Race & Justice (Iowa) and Legal Communication & Rhetoric. She co-authored the book, I Wish I Read This Book Before Law School: Advice from Top Professors on How to Adjust, Succeed, and Thrive. She also has a forthcoming book, (co-editor Robert J. Razzante, Ph.D.) Identity, Power & Professional Responsibility: Selected Readings and Materials (Carolina Academic Press, 2006). A national presenter on identity performance and cultural awareness, she has spoken at law schools and legal organizations across the country.

 

Professor Culver graduated from Saint Louis School of Law (SLU). She clerked in the Missouri Court of Appeals and practiced as a civil litigator in St. Louis, Missouri. After practice, she taught at her alma mater, SLU, and then at California Western School of Law (San Diego) and University of California-Irvine School of Law before moving to Utah.

 

She was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholars and Fulbright Specialist Award, and was most recently awarded a Research Fellow appointment with The University of the Free State (UFS), Department of Public Law, Bloemfontein Campus in South Africa.