Rate My Professor Karen Tani

Karen M. Tani is the Seaman Family University Professor and a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, holding joint appointments in the Carey Law School and the Department of History. She is a scholar of U.S. legal history with broad interests in social welfare law, administrative agencies, disability law, and the role of rights in the modern American state. Tani earned her B.A. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2002, J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2007—where she was on the Law Review and Order of the Coif—and Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, as the first graduate of its JD/PhD program in American Legal History. After law school, she clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 2007 to 2008. She held fellowships including the George Sharswood Fellow in Law and History at Penn (2008–2010) and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU (2010–2011). Tani joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law as Assistant Professor in 2011, advancing to Professor in 2018 until 2020, and served as visiting professor at Columbia Law School in 2018 and Yale Law School in 2019.

Her book States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) won the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Key publications include “Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court” (Harvard Law Review, 2024), “Disability and the Ongoing Federalism Revolution” with Katie Eyer (Yale Law Journal, 2024), “The Pennhurst Doctrines and the Lost Disability History of the ‘New Federalism’” (California Law Review, 2022), “Compensation, Commodification, and Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies and Excluded Nonlaboring Humans” (Michigan Law Review, 2021), and “Administrative Equal Protection: Federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Rights of the Poor” (Cornell Law Review, 2015). Tani has received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law (2017), A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course (2024), and Boalt Hall Women’s Association Teaching Award (2017). She teaches Torts, American Legal History, and Law & Inequality, and coordinates the Legal History Consortium at Penn Carey Law.