Saru Matambanadzo

Saru M. Matambanadzo is the Moise S. Steeg Jr. Associate Professor of Law at Tulane University School of Law and Senior Director of Online Legal Education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on critical race theory, feminist legal theory, LatCrit theory, vulnerability theory, and related traditions in critical social and legal thought.Matambanadzo’s scholarship examines how law organizes social and economic belonging and inclusion through hierarchies informed by race, gender, and disability. Her research uses various critical theory traditions to address pregnancy and sex discrimination, workplace equity, gender identity and legal sex, legal personhood, vulnerability, critical legal pedagogy, racial capitalism, and the relationship between legal institutions and systems of power.

A central concern of Matambanadzo’s scholarship is the way law constructs and regulates bodies and identities. Her writing explores how legal categories that appear neutral can reproduce hierarchy, exclusion, and material inequality. At the same time, her work considers how critical theory can contribute to more expansive understandings of equality, dignity, democratic participation, and institutional responsibility. Her scholarship on pregnancy, the “fourth trimester,” embodiment, vulnerability, legal sex, and feminist theories of the person reflects a sustained engagement with the relationship between legal doctrine and lived experience.

Matambanadzo is an award-winning teacher. She teaches classes in both Tulane’s J.D. program and its online legal-education programs, including the Master of Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law. Her teaching and seminars engage employment discrimination, feminist legal theory, gender and the law, race and constitutional law, legal theory, and related questions of identity and social justice. In the classroom, she brings together doctrinal analysis and critical inquiry, encouraging students to examine the historical and institutional assumptions embedded in law.

She is especially committed to student writing, research, and mentorship. Through her teaching and advising, she has overseen and supported extensive student writing, including research papers, journal work, and other scholarly projects. Her contributions to student development have been recognized with the Felix Frankfurter Teaching Award in 2017 and 2026, as well as a university-wide Trainee Mentorship Award for her work overseeing student writing and mentoring students as scholars and researchers. She has also been awarded numerous internal research awards, including a Professorship at the Taylor Center, a research award from the Newcomb Institute, the inaugural Gordon Gamm Faculty Fellowship, and a Lavin-Bernick grant.

As Senior Director of Online Legal Education, Matambanadzo leads Tulane Law School’s online programs and contributes to the development of innovative approaches to graduate and professional legal education. Her work in this area reflects her broader commitment to making rigorous legal scholarship accessible to students pursuing advanced study while working in professional and public-service settings.

Matambanadzo’s academic and professional service reflects her commitment to interdisciplinary legal scholarship and critical approaches to legal education. She serves on the board of LatCrit.org and has served as an organizer of the Biennial LatCrit conference, the Faculty Development Workshop, and the Margaret Montoya Writing Workshop. She was a founding board member of ClassCrits.org and serves on the organizing committee for the National People of Color Conference. She has chaired the American Association of Law Schools Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues and is currently Chair Elect of the AALS Section on Critical Theory. She has also contributed to university and law-school initiatives involving teaching, mentorship, curriculum development, and faculty leadership.

Matambanadzo earned her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in support of her doctoral research. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A., summa cum laude, in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Her interdisciplinary training in law, philosophy, gender studies, and critical theory informs a body of scholarship that speaks to urgent national conversations about racial capitalism, workplace justice, gender equality, legal identity, embodiment, and the role of law in shaping social life. Through her scholarship, teaching, service, and mentorship, Matambanadzo brings critical theory into sustained conversation with the institutions and legal structures that govern everyday life.