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Joseph F. Rice School of Law

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Etienne C. Toussaint

Title: Associate Professor of Law
Joseph F. Rice School of Law
Email: ectoussaint@sc.edu
Phone: 803-777-8178
Office: 1525 Senate Street
Columbia, SC 29208
Resources: CV [pdf]
Etienne C. Toussaint

Biography

Etienne C. Toussaint is a private law scholar whose research examines how dominant cultural values and assumptions embedded in private law sustain economic and social hierarchies, and how imaginative and historical perspectives from marginalized communities can help reimagine law and political economy toward more liberatory ends. Drawing on critical legal theory, history, and cultural analysis, his work interrogates the normative foundations of private law across contexts such as community economic development, environmental and food justice, and social movements, while also exploring how literature and art can reshape legal meaning and expand the boundaries of legal imagination. He teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, Critical Legal History, and the Reconstruction Constitution.

Toussaint’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in leading law reviews, including the Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, and Columbia Human Rights Law Review, among others. His shorter essays have appeared in leading online journals, including the Virginia Law Review Online, UCLA Law Review Discourse, NYU Law Review Online, and Columbia Law Review Forum. His work has been competitively selected for presentation at national workshops and conferences, including the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, Georgetown Law’s Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Junior Faculty Business & Financial Law Workshop.

Professor Toussaint has been nationally recognized for his teaching, scholarship, and service. In 2024, he received the National Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Award. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and received both the Faculty Scholarship Award and the Faculty Diversity Leadership Award from the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. In 2022, he received the Junior Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). In 2021, he was honored as the Stegner Center Young Scholar by the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Professor Toussaint joined the University of South Carolina from the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, where he received the 2018 Outstanding Neophyte Law Professor Award. At UDC Law, he taught Contracts, Business Organizations, and Law and Literature, and co-directed the UDC Community Development Law Clinic, representing dozens of small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and cooperative housing associations across the nation’s capital. He began his legal career as a project finance associate with the international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP and later served as a Law & Policy Fellow with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C., focusing on fair housing law and policy. He began his law teaching career as a Friedman Fellow at The George Washington University Law School, where he earned an LL.M. in Advocacy under the mentorship of the late Professor Susan R. Jones.

Professor Toussaint earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he was designated a Ronald McNair Scholar and Alpha Phi Alpha Distinguished Collegiate. He earned an M.S.E. in Environmental Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University, where he served as Graduate Student Adviser for Engineers Without Borders and led international development projects in South Africa. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as a student-attorney in the Transactional Law Clinic, the Ghana Human Rights Clinic, and the Harvard Defenders. At HLS, he also served as an editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vice President of the Board of Student Advisers, and National Director of the Nelson Mandela International Negotiations Competition for the National Black Law Students Association.

Professor Toussaint has served as a Board Member of the Washington Council of Lawyers, a National Advisory Board Member of the National Black Law Students Association, and a member of the American Bar Association Commission on Homelessness and Poverty. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy and on the Executive Boards of the AALS Professional Responsibility, Business Associations, and Minority Sections (as Chair).

Born and raised in the South Bronx, Professor Toussaint is the proud husband of Dr. Ebony A. Toussaint, Ph.D., and the father of their three amazing sons

Education

  • B.S., The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • M.S.E., The Johns Hopkins University
  • J.D., Harvard Law School
  • LL.M., The George Washington University Law School

Teaching

  • Contracts
  • Business Associations
  • Secured Transactions
  • Law and Political Economy (Seminar)
  • The Reconstruction Constitution (Seminar)
  • Critical Legal History (Reading Group)

Selected Scholarship

  • “The Price of the Ticket”: James Baldwin’s Rage as Afrofuturist Praxis (Article)
  • Flesh That Weeps: Toni Morrison, Hair Discrimination, and Embodied Exclusion (Essay)
  • The Hidden Tax: Addressing Hair Discrimination in the Legal Profession (Book Chapter)
  • Digital Resistance and Afrofuturist Futures (Book Chapter)
  • Letter of Enthusiastic Support, from Black Male Law Deans and Law Professors for the Senate’s Confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to Serve as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, to United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, March 14, 2022.
  • Written Testimony, Critical Race Theory and the Future of Education in South Carolina, Public Hearing on H. 4325, H. 4343, H. 4392, H. 4605, and H. 4799, South Carolina House Education and Public Works Committee, Columbia, S.C., Feb. 16, 2022 (with Jada Wilson and the UofSC M.J. Perry Black Law Students Association).
  • Report of Trial Monitors, Donziger Criminal Contempt Proceedings Violated International Human Rights Law and Standards: Final Observations and Conclusions on the Criminal Contempt Proceedings against Steven Donziger in the Trial Division, 2019-2021, Pilot Project to establish International Monitoring Panels to Evaluate Trials in the United States (IMPETUS), January 24, 2022 (with Stephen Rapp and Catherine Morris).
  • Report of Trial Monitors, United States v. Steven Donziger, No. 19-CR-561 (LAP); 11-CIV-691 (LAK), United States Federal Court, South New York Trial Division, Pilot Project to establish International Monitoring Panels to Evaluate Trials in the United States (IMPETUS), October 27, 2020 (with Stephen Rapp, Catherine Morris, and Nykeeba Brown).
  • Public Testimony Report, Public Hearing on B23-390, The Urban Farming Land Lease Amendment Act of 2019, Council of the D.C. Committee on Transportation & the Environment, Washington, D.C., Nov. 18, 2019 (with Sabine O’Hara).

Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

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