Maureen E. “Molly” Brady, an expert in property law, was named a professor of law, effective July 1.
Brady, whose scholarship focuses on land use law, local government law, legal history and intellectual property law, joined the Harvard Law School faculty as assistant professor of law in 2019.
“Molly Brady is a productive, creative, and rigorous property law scholar whose work deepens our understanding of the way property shapes institutions and governments,” said John F. Manning ’85, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean of Harvard Law School. “She is also a superb and generous teacher and mentor to our students whose excellence inspires all around her.”
Brady is currently an associate reporter for the American Law Institute’s Fourth Restatement of Property.
Within her first year of teaching at HLS, she was selected as Section 3 Leader and she was the recipient of the 2020 Student Government Teaching and Advising Awards
“It is an unbelievable honor to join the ranks of the tenured faculty at HLS. I am grateful to my students and colleagues for their confidence in me and for making me a better teacher and scholar,” said Brady.
Her article, “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,”won both the Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarly Papers Prize for junior faculty members in their first five years of law teaching and the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize for the year’s best paper by an early-career scholar.
Her article, “Turning Neighbors into Nuisances,”was published in March in the Harvard Law Review. Her scholarship also has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Virginia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online and Cardozo Law Review, among other journals.
Prior to joining the HLS faculty, Brady served as an associate professor at the University of Virginia School (UVA) of Law, where she taught courses that include Land Use Law, State and Local Government Law, Property Law and Urban Legal History. At UVA, she received the 2019 UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2018 Z Society Distinguished Faculty Award for “one outstanding member of the University’s faculty who has positively impacted the student body,” and an invitation to the Seven Society 27th Annual Monticello Dinner Series for “exemplary scholarship and transformative instruction of students.”
She received an A.B. summa cum laude in history in 2008 from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Harvard-Radcliffe Foundation for Women’s Athletics Prize for the top female scholar-athlete.
She obtained her J.D. in 2011 from Yale Law School, where she was the two-time recipient of the Parker Prize for legal history scholarship and was awarded the Quintin Johnstone Prize in Real Property Law, the Jewell Prize for an outstanding contribution to a Yale Law School journal, and the Cullen Prize for the best paper written by a first-year student.
After graduating, she served as a clerk to Judge Bruce M. Selya on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at Ropes and Gray in Boston as a corporate associate focusing on intellectual property transactions. Before joining the UVA law faculty, she earned a Ph.D. in law from Yale University in 2016.