Melissa Mortazavi

About

Dean Mortazavi teaches and writes about torts, legal ethics, and food law and policy, where she explores the dialogue between law, institutions, and identity.  Her articles have appeared in the Fordham, Columbia, UCLA, and Cardozo Law Reviews amongst others. Dean Mortazavi is currently chair of the AALS Professional Responsibility Section, Executive Committee Member of the AALS Torts Section, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.  

Dean Mortazavi is a proud first generation American and the first in her family to graduate law school. She joined the University of Oklahoma College of Law faculty as an Associate Professor of Law in the fall of 2015, after serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. She earned tenure in 2020 and was awarded the President’s Second Century Professorship in 2021. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, in Government and Theatre from Cornell University, where she was a Conger Wood Fellow and graduated with distinction. In law school, she served as an Editor for the California Law Review and received the Allen F. Broussard Fellowship and the Department Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship for Farsi. After graduating law school, Professor Mortazavi clerked for the Honorable Beverly B. Martin of the Northern District of Georgia.

Prior to teaching, Dean Mortazavi was a commercial litigator at Debevoise & Plimpton L.L.P. where her practice included cases involving products liability, professional ethics, corporate governance, food and drug law, and sustainable resource and energy management. Dean Mortazavi also engaged in various significant pro bono civil rights representations, including briefing before the Supreme Court on behalf of Guantanamo detainees.