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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 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.

Known for her expertise on legal and judicial ethics, Jefferson has spoken to audiences around the globe and has testified before Congress and the Federal Judiciary about ethics reforms. She is an award-winning author of three casebooks — Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary ApproachLegal Ethics for the Real World: Building Skills Through Case StudyLeadership, Law, and Pipelines to Power — along with more than 30 scholarly articles. She also is the author of the books Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court and Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis.

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.