The Yale Law Journal is thrilled to announce Volume 134’s Emerging Scholar of the Year: Kate Redburn.

The Yale Law Journal’s Emerging Scholar of the Year Award celebrates the achievements of early-career academics who have made significant contributions to legal thought and scholarship. It seeks to spotlight the exceptional work of its honorees and to promote scholarship that has the potential to drive improvements in the law. The Emerging Scholar of the Year is selected by the Journal’s membership following an intensive research and deliberation process.

Volume 134’s Emerging Scholar of the Year, Professor Redburn, will join the faculty at Columbia Law School as an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law in July 2025. They specialize in legal history, antidiscrimination law, and the First Amendment.

Professor Redburn’s historical work examines how so-called “culture war” conflicts over gender and sexuality have shaped civil-rights law and U.S. political economy. Their most recent publication—The Equal Right to Exclude: Religious Speech and the Road to 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in the California Law Review—reconstructs the legal strategy that the New Christian Right pursued to obtain speech protection for service denial in public accommodations. In 2023, in the Law and History Review, Professor Redburn published Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963-86, arguing that a distinct transgender legal movement emerged through the campaign to decriminalize cross-dressing. A book review, The Visibility Trap, in the University of Chicago Law Review, braided historical and theoretical analysis to examine the role that strategic ignorance has played in the regulation of sexuality in the United States. They also published a note, Zoned Out: How Zoning Law Undermines Family Law’s Functional Turn, in the Yale Law Journal. Professor Redburn’s current project, tentatively entitled The Right to Choose Sex, will appear in the Harvard Law Review.

Professor Redburn is a graduate of Yale Law School, where they served as a Legal History Fellow and received the Colby Townsend Memorial Prize. They are also a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia University, where they were awarded the J. Winthrop Chanler Historical Prize. Before joining Columbia Law School as an Academic Fellow and Lecturer in Law, Professor Redburn served as a law clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. They are completing a Ph.D. in the Department of History and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale.

The Journal is excited to celebrate the achievements of Professor Redburn. Please join us in congratulating them!