The Buckley Institute awarded current deputy dean and Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver the Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize for his commitment to promoting disagreement and critical examination in and beyond his classrooms.
Kevin Xiao YLS ’27 and Professor Justin Driver during the event. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Emily Akbar
Campus Reporting Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Thursday, current deputy dean and Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver received the Buckley Institute’s Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize. The prize awards a Yale faculty member who promotes intellectual diversity within and beyond the classroom. After having been chosen from among 115 nominations and a favorable vote from a panel of judges, Driver received $10,000 for his work fostering open debate.
Driver is best known for his work in constitutional law, education law, and race. In his first book, The Schoolhouse Gate, Driver argues that public schools are one of the most important places where Americans actually experience constitutional rights, including speech, religion, race, and privacy, among others. Driver also contends that one cannot understand the Supreme Court’s role in American life without looking at its decisions about schools.
His most recent book, The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education, examines the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision and how readers may misunderstand this ruling. Driver also criticizes some liberal defenses of affirmative action for what he sees as a failure to engage with counterarguments to the policy. He also argues that the ruling does not eliminate universities’ ability to pursue racial diversity.
Driver has also served on President Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, and is a member of the American Law Institute and American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2026, Driver also became a Guggenheim Fellow.
Accepting his award at The Study at Yale, Driver spoke amongst a crowd of former students, fellow faculty, and other members of the Yale community about his commitment to promoting intellectual diversity. During a conversation with his law student Kevin Xiao YLS ‘27, Driver described his worries about law students falling into ideological echo chambers while on campus. He argued that students who primarily discuss political questions with those who share their same views risk becoming more entrenched in those positions.
“I try to really suggest that when you attempt to keep yourself ideologically pure, you end up preventing yourself from being the most effective advocate for the causes that you hold dear,” Driver said. “And I say that, especially to the liberals, because, as you know all too well, there are lots more left-of-center students at Yale Law School and Yale University.”
He then reflected on his own experiences of challenging the ideological mainstream. Driver recalled reading the Southern Manifesto as a first-year law professor, a 1956 document that critiqued the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional. While Driver previously understood the document to contain “overt racism,” he said that, upon reading it, he found that was not the case. Driver encouraged students not to blindly accept others’ claims without independent research.
“When I read it, it did not say what I knew it said, and that is to say, that the virulent open racism was not there,” Driver said in reference to the Southern Manifesto. “And that was a lesson to me, that sometimes documents accrue certain baggage, and you really need to engage with the actual arguments that people are making, rather than engaging with a phony conception.”
Driver then described the practices he regularly uses to encourage students to disagree in his classrooms. For example, when discussing the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Driver asked students who agreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion to identify its biggest weaknesses. He also asked students who sided with the dissent to critique that opinion instead. Driver took a similar approach to affirmative action, asking students to critique both sides regardless of their personal beliefs.
“It’s one thing to sort of just pay lip service and say, ‘Here’s what they would say on the other side,’” Driver said. “Even if it’s not your idea, try to take that seriously.”
Driver attributed much of his teaching approach to his training to become a public school teacher before attending law school. He said that experience helped him think about how teachers can better encourage student participation.
“Sadly, law schools don’t require professors to go through teacher training. You know, it’s all about what you write, but that’s an important part of the job to me,” he said.
In an interview with The Beacon after the event, Driver praised Yale Law Students’ intelligence and curiosity, noting that many of them will likely be his colleagues. However, he said academia still needs to pursue ideological diversity.
“I hope that more conservative students will think about becoming professors because we need legal academia to include more people from a broader array of perspectives,” Driver told The Beacon.
His former student and event moderator Kevin Xiao praised Driver for encouraging him and his fellow students to critically examine all the cases they covered. Xiao reflected on his first day of constitutional law class with Driver, and how he was shocked that they discussed Brown to that degree.
“We started a discussion, and the first question he asked was, ‘So what are your thoughts on this case?’ And I was thinking in my head, no one in this class is gonna disagree with that. Like, who’s gonna go on the record and say, Reynolds, right?” Xiao said, referencing the plaintiff, William Reynolds, in a failed Supreme Court challenge to segregation. “That was one of my favorite examples of him pushing people to speak out.”
Another one of his students, Cheney Wen YLS ‘28, also praised Driver’s “open-minded” and “supportive” nature.
“I don’t have a particular political leaning, but I want to engage with everyone across the political spectrum. And Professor Driver is excellent at encouraging the formation of camaraderie inside the classroom,” he said.