Professor Soucek Receives Chancellor's Award for Diversity, Community

Professor Brian Soucek was honored with a UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community.

The award recognizes achievements that contribute in substantial ways to the development and well-being of UC Davis’ diverse and evolving community.

A campus article on the 2023 class of honorees encapsulates Soucek’s emphasis on and achievements within the pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion:

“Brian Soucek is Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the School of Law, where he has taught constitutional law, civil procedure, art law, and asylum/refugee law since 2013. In recent years, Professor Soucek has written and spoken widely about the constitutionality of DEI statements used in faculty hiring and advancement. As chair of the systemwide faculty committee on academic freedom, Professor Soucek worked with senate and administrative colleagues to revise and improve UC’s own recommendations on the use of DEI statements. Much of his other recent scholarship and advocacy work has been similarly focused on real and perceived collisions between free speech/academic freedom and nondiscrimination/equality values at colleges and universities. In articles and legal briefs, he has taken on free speech challenges to university harassment policies, academic freedom claims by professors who seek to misgender their students, and philosophical claims about slurs. Professor Soucek served on the committee that drafted APM-011, the University of California’s trailblazing recognition of the academic freedom of non-faculty academic appointees. And he is currently a member of the Presidential Working Group charged with developing a university-wide anti-discrimination policy for the University of California. Professor Soucek’s earlier scholarship on sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace won a Dukeminier Award from UCLA’s Williams Institute, recognizing the year’s best articles on sexual orientation and gender identity; his work on those issues was cited to and by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, the case that established federal protections against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Having received a Ph.D.  in the philosophy of art before going to law school, Professor Soucek also writes about ways aesthetic judgment shapes the law and the law shapes our aesthetic lives. He just completed a three-year term as Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics, and is currently serving on a committee looking at how to further advance and diversity that organization and the field it represents.”

Dean Kevin R. Johnson received the inaugural Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community in 2001.