Rhonda Magee

Professor Rhonda V. Magee is a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers, law students, and for minimizing social-identity-based bias. A full-time faculty member at University of San Francisco since 1998, and a full professor since 2004, she has been named Dean’s Circle Research Scholar, served as co-director of the University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, and co-facilitator of the Ignatian Faculty Forum faculty development program. She teaches Torts; Race, Law and Policy; and courses in Contemplative and Mindful Law and Law Practice. She is a trained and highly practiced facilitator, with an emphasis on mindful communication, trained through programs at the University of Massachusetts’s School of Medicine’s Oasis Teacher Training Institute, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business Facilitator Training Program. In April 2015, she was named a fellow of the Mind and Life Institute.

Professor Magee recently served as visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and a senior fellow with the Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness and Law. She has published in such scholarly journals as the Virginia Law Review and the Alabama Law Review; and in the media, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Mindful Magazine. Her writing and teaching is inspired by a commitment to education for effective problem-solving and presence-based leadership in a diverse and ever-changing world, and to humanizing legal education. Professor Magee is the author of numerous articles on mindfulness in legal education, including "Educating Lawyers to Meditate?" 79 UMKC L. Rev. 535 (Lead Article, 2011), and "The Way of ColorInsight: Understanding Race and Law Effectively Using Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices" Georgetown J. of Mod. Crit. Race Perspectives (forthcoming, 2016). She is a nationally recognized thought and practice leader in the emerging fields of contemplative legal education and law practice and contemplative teaching in higher education. She was a founding member of the executive board of the AALS’s Section on Balance in Legal Education and is a founding member of its subsection on Mindfulness in Legal Education. She presently serves as a member of the board of advisors to the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine’s Center for Mindfulness and the Steering Committee of the Mind and Life Institute, and is a founder of the effort to transform the criminal justice system through mindfulness and compassion practices (Transforming Justice). Her current writings examine mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy as means of teaching for effectiveness in diverse learning communities, of developing more just law and policy, and of enhancing collaborations for transformative change towards a more equitable world. Visit academia.edu for more information on her recent scholarship.

• Contemplative Pedagogy
• Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Immigration
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Humanizing Legal Education
• Identity-Sensitive Pedagogy
• Immigration
• Legal Education
• Mindfulness and Social Justice
• Race Law
• Race, Racism, and U.S. Law

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher Practicum and Teacher Development Intensive, Oasis Institute, University of Massachusetts Medical Center
• JD, University of Virginia
• MA, University of Virginia
• BA, University of Virginia

• Founding Director, Center for Contemplative Law and Ethics, University of San Francisco School of Law
• Visiting Scholar, U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Center for the Study of Law and Society (August 2014 - July 2015)
• Associate, Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal

• USF Ignatian Faculty Service Award, 2014

• The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (TarcherPerigee, 2019)

• “Mindfulness plays role in educating lawyers to confront racism,” American Bar Association Journal (2016). Read More
• “Martin Luther King Jr. offers insight into 'justice for all',” American Bar Association Journal (2016). Read more
• “If You Plant Corn, You Get Corn: On Mindfulness and Racial Justice in Florida and Beyond,” 90 Florida State Bar Journal 37-39 (2016). Read more
• “Life experience and cognitive science deepen the case for mindfulness in the law,” 102 American Bar Association Journal (2016). Read more
• “The Way of ColorInsight: Teaching and Learning Race and Law Through Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices,” Georgetown Law Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives (2015). SSRN
• “Educating Lawyers to Meditate? From Exercises to Epistemology to Ethics: The Contemplative Practice and Law Movement as Legal Education Reform,” 79 University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 535 (2011). (Lead Article) SSRN
• “Slavery As Immigration?,” 44 University of San Francisco Law Review 273 (2009). SSRN
• “Competing Narratives, Competing Jurisprudences: Are Law Schools Racist? And the Case for an Integral Critical Approach to Thinking, Talking, Writing, and Teaching About Race,” 43 University of San Francisco Law Review 777 (2009). SSRN
• “Toward an Integral Critical Approach to Thinking, Talking, Writing and Teaching About Race,” 42 University of San Francisco Law Review 259 (2008). SSRN
• “Legal Education and the Formation of Professional Identity: A Critical Spirituo-Humanistic – 'Humanity Consciousness' – Perspective,” 31 New York University Review of Law and Social Change 467 (2007). SSRN
• “Inviting New Worlds, Turning to New Voices: A Post-9/11 Meditation on 'Where Do We Go From Here?,” 3 Seattle Journal for Social Justice 587 (2005). SSRN
• “Racial Suffering as Human Suffering: An Existentially-Grounded Humanity Consciousness as a Guide to a Fourteenth Amendment Reborn,” 13 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 891 (2004). SSRN
• “Affirmative Action after Grutter: Reflections on a Tortured Death, Imagining a Humanity-Affirming Reincarnation,” 63 Louisiana Law Review 705 (2003). SSRN
• “The Third Reconstruction: An Alternative to Race Consciousness and Colorblindness in Post-Slavery America,” 54 Alabama Law Review 483 (2003). SSRN
• “The Justice of Parental Accountability: Hypothetical Disinterested Citizens and Real Victims’ Voices in the Debate over Expanded Parental Liability,” 75 Temple Law Review 375 (2002). SSRN
• “The Master's Tools, From the Bottom Up: Responses to African-American Reparations Theory in Mainstream and Outsider Remedies Discourse,” 79 Virginia Law Review 863 (1993). SSRN