Athena Mutua, LLM

Professor of Law & Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar

University at Buffalo, School of Law (SUNY)

Athena Mutua is a professor of law and the Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo, School of Law (SUNY). She specializes in the area of civil rights and the critical analysis of the role of law in both facilitating and hindering justice across the intersections of race, class and gender. Recent examples of this work include: Reflections on Critical Race Theory in a Time of Backlash (forthcoming); Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law (2022); Liberalism’s Identity Politics: A Reply to Fukuyama (2020); Disparity in Judicial Misconduct Cases: Colorblind Diversity (2014); and Multidimensionality is to Masculinities what Intersectionality is to Feminism (2013). In addition to legal scholarship, Professor Mutua has a gift for investigating important but largely unexamined issues, such as her work on race and class, and the edited collection on PROGRESSIVE BLACK MASCULINITIES, the latter for which she received the UB Exceptional Scholars Young Investigator’s Award. Professor Mutua is a founding member of the Critical (Legal) Collective, an organization meant to safeguard and advance critical studies in the wake of attacks on critical knowledge and multiracial democracy;” and co-founder of ClassCrits, a network of scholars exploring issues of law and political economy. Professor Mutua currently serves as vice chair to the New York Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which recently published the report: Racial Discrimination and Eviction Policies and Enforcement in New York (2022). She is also currently chair of the University at Buffalo’s Presidential Review Board. Professor Mutua teaches in the areas of business law, constitutional law and critical race theory, and in 2017 received the Jacob D. Hyman Award for her work with students of color. She received law degrees from both Harvard Law School and The American University, Washington College of Law.