University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law

The urban public law school with a small liberal arts feel

Nancy Levit Curators' and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law email 816-235-2391 Class Links Vita Professor Levit has been on the faculty of the Law School since 1988. She teaches Defamation & Privacy, Employment Discrimination, Gender & Justice, Jurisprudence, and Torts, and is the faculty advisor to the UMKC Law Review. She is also a member of UMKC’s Women’s and Gender Studies faculty. She has previously taught courses in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law. Professor Levit's scholarship is principally in the areas of constitutional law, jurisprudence, torts, and feminist legal theory. Her book about sex segregation, feminism, and masculinity, The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law, was published in 1998 by New York University Press. She is also co-author (with Robert L. Hayman, Jr., and Richard Delgado) of a jurisprudence textbook, Jurisprudence—Classical and Contemporary: From Natural Law to Postmodernism, published in 2002 by West Group. Her book, Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer, co-authored with Rob Verchick, was published in 2006 by NYU Press. Her book with Doug Linder, The Happy Lawyer, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Oxford University Press. She was the editor of the Kansas Criminal Defense Manual and is presently the editorial associate of the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Her articles have appeared in the California Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, the George Washington University Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Hofstra Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, the University of Colorado Law Review, and the Wisconsin Law Review, among other places. She received her B.A. with highest honors from Bates College, and her J.D. from the University of Kansas, where she was an editor on the Law Review. She was the recipient of a number of academic honors, including Order of the Coif, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and the West Award for Scholarship. After graduation, Professor Levit clerked for federal district judge Frank Theis, and worked on the Dalkon Shield multidistrict litigation. During this time, she volunteered at the Sedgwick County Public Defender Office. Prior to joining the UMKC faculty, she was a trial attorney with Stinson, Mag & Fizzell. She has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union Legal Panel and an Assistant Special Master for the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, and has engaged in pro bono criminal and death penalty representation. The students have voted Professor Levit the Law School’s Outstanding Professor of the Year three times (most recently in 2009). She has received the Daniel L. Brenner Faculty Publishing Award (three times), and the Elmer P. Pierson Faculty Teaching Award three times (most recently in 2009),and the campus N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity. In 1998 she was named the Law School’s first Daniel L. Brenner Scholar. In 2000 she was awarded a UKC Trustees Faculty Fellowship. In 2001, she received the title of Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law. In 2004 she was the UMKC campus’ nominee for the University of Missouri’s Presidential Teaching Award. Also that year, she received the Missouri Governor's Award for Teaching Excellence. The University of Missouri awarded her a Curators' Professorship in 2005. Professor Levit enjoys distance running and sprint triathlons. She is married to Tim Geary, and they have two children, Aaron and Dylan Elizabeth. You can access her papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=589402