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Renee Knake Jefferson

Renee Knake Jefferson
  • Trustee
  • Term ends Jan. 1, 2031

Renee Knake Jefferson was appointed to the Board of Trustees by Gov.Gretchen Whitmer in December 2019. She was elected to a full eight-year term beginning on Jan. 1, 2023.

Jefferson currently is a tenured professor of law and holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston, where she teaches constitutional law, professional responsibility and a writing seminar on gender, law, leadership and power. In addition to her teaching role, she is the assistant dean of Outcomes, Assessments and Strategy.

From 2006 to 2016, Jefferson served on the faculty at Michigan State University, receiving tenure at the College of Law and also teaching at the Eli Broad College of Business and the Honors College. In 2015, she was a scholar-in-residence at Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She was named the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in 2019. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Jefferson is an award-winning author of three casebooks — Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach; Legal Ethics for the Real World: Building Skills Through Case Study; Leadership, Law, and Pipelines to Power — along with more than 30 scholarly articles including publications in the Fordham Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Illinois Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Washington & Lee Law Review and the Washington Law Review. She also is the author of Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press 2020) and Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis (NYU Press 2024).

An internationally recognized expert on legal ethics, Jefferson has been invited to speak throughout the United States and in countries such as Australia, Canada, England, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates. She is regularly contacted to assist in legal matters involving lawyer discipline and judicial ethics, and has testified before Congress and the Federal Judiciary about reforms to rules governing judicial financial disclosures as well as sexual harassment and other workplace misconduct.

Before her academic career, Jefferson practiced law at Mayer Brown in Chicago and Hunton & Williams in Richmond. She also worked as an assistant city attorney for Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School.

She is married to the Honorable Wallace B. Jefferson, who is the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas and the first African American to serve as a justice in Texas. He is an alumnus of the James Madison College at Michigan State, as is her stepson. She resides in East Lansing, where two of her children have grown up attending East Lansing public schools.