Susan P. Sturm

Professor Susan Sturm’s scholarship and teaching focus on advancing racial equity and full participation in educational, legal, and cultural institutions, building leadership capacity to advance change toward full participation, and exploring the role of law and lawyers in advancing just and equitable institutions. 

Sturm has written and spoken extensively about race, gender, legal education, and full participation in higher education. Her new book, entitled What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions, was released in 2025 by Princeton University Press.

Sturm is a co-chair and architect of Columbia Law School’s Davis Polk Leadership Initiative, a cross-disciplinary effort to prepare students to succeed as leaders in a wide range of sectors. She is the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change and an inaugural Provost Senior Faculty Teaching Scholar. Sturm teaches Civil Procedure, Lawyer Leadership: Leading Self, Leading Others, Leading Change, Access to Justice for People in Prison, and Lawyering for Change. She received Columbia University’s Presidential Teaching Award in 2007.

At the Center for Institutional and Social Change, which she founded in 2007, Sturm leads collaborative action research projects with institutional and community leaders in the areas of education, criminal justice, and community development. She collaborates with a wide variety of higher education, government, judicial, cultural, and community-based organizations seeking to advance full participation. She is the architect and creator of the Centering Change Skills Hub, an online platform aimed at cultivating leadership and building the capacity to address race in law schools, court systems, and communities. 

Professor Sturm has served as the Vice President and Director of Policy for the Tony award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and is the co-creator and instructor, with BAC, of Theater of Change:  Reimagining Justice, a highly acclaimed course offered at Columbia Law School that brings together individuals directly impacted by mass incarceration, high-level theater artists, and advocates and policymakers focused on humanizing and transforming the criminal legal system.