Background

Derek Black is a professor of law and the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He also directs the law school’s Constitutional Law Center.  His areas of expertise include education law and policy, constitutional law, and civil rights. The focus of his current scholarship is the intersection of constitutional law and public education, particularly as it pertains to educational equality and fairness for disadvantaged students. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review and dozens of others. His work has been cited by federal courts and various briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court. Based on that research, he offers expert witness testimony in school funding, voucher, and federal education policy litigation.

He is the author of a leading education law casebook, Education Law: Equality, Fairness, and Reform, and two other books aimed at wider audiences, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy and Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline.

He began his career teaching at Howard University School of Law, where he founded and directed the Education Rights Center. Prior to teaching, he litigated education cases at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Scholarship

Books

• Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy (Yale University Press 2025).
• Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy (PublicAffairs 2020).
• Education Law: Equality, Fairness, and Reform (3d ed., Aspen Publishing 2021) (with Robert A. Garda, Jr., John E. Taylor, and Emily Gold Waldman).
• Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline (NYU Press 2016).

Articles

• Executive Federalism, Public Education, and the Architecture of Overreach, 136 Yale L.Rev.__(forthcoming 2026). 
• Education, Orthodoxy, and the First Amendment, 94  Geo. Wash. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026).
• The Education Power, 110 Va. L. Rev. 2 (2024).
• Localism, Pretext, and the Color of School Dollars, 107 Minn. L. Rev. 1415 (2023).
• Religion, Discrimination, and the Future of Public Education, 13 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 3 (2023). 
• When Religion and the Public-Education Mission Collide, 132 Yale L.J.F. 559 (2022) (invited).
• Freedom, Democracy, and the Right to Education, 116 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1031 (2022).
• Educational Gerrymandering: Money, Motives, and Constitutional Rights, 94 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1385 (2019).
• The Right to Education, Equal Opportunity, and the Schoolhouse Gate, 128 Yale L.J. 2302 (2019) (review essay with Michelle Adams).
• The Fundamental Right to Education, 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1059 (2019).
• Preferencing Educational Choice: The Constitutional Limits, 102 Cornell L. Rev. 1359 (2018).
  
• The Constitutional Compromise to Guarantee Education, 70 Stan. L. Rev. 735 (2018).

Education

• J.D., University of North Carolina School of Law
• B.A., University of Tennessee

Teaching

• Constitutional Law (LAWS 523)
• Evidence (LAWS 671)
• Civil Rights Seminar (LAWS 737)
• Education Law and Policy (LAWS 766)