The University of Denver has appointed Bruce Smith as dean of the Sturm College of Law, effective July 1, 2016. Professor Smith has served as a tenured professor at Illinois since 2006, as the Guy Raymond Jones Faculty Scholar since 2009, as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2008 to 2009, and as dean from 2009 to 2014.

“We thank Bruce for the many positive contributions he made here at Illinois, and we extend our best wishes to him in his new position,” said Vikram Amar, Dean of the College of Law. Amar added: “We have (for our size) a very large number of former faculty members who are selected to serve as deans at other law schools, which speaks well for the stature of Illinois, and also for the way we work hard to be connected to other law schools, something I am always looking to do more of.”

Professor Smith has taught as a visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and The George Washington University Law School. In 2008, he received the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Campus Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching, which recognizes excellence in the classroom, innovative approaches to teaching, and other contributions to improved instruction.

A specialist in Anglo-American criminal procedure in the 18th and 19th centuries, Professor Smith is the author of History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009) (with John Langbein and Renée Lettow Lerner). He received his B.A. summa cum laude with highest honors in history from Williams College and bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Cambridge, which he attended as a Herchel Smith Fellow. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal, and his Ph.D. in history from the Yale Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.