Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein is a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. He is also a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Rothstein  previously served as a senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1999 to 2002, he was the national education columnist for The New York Times. Rothstein is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which examines how federal, state, and local policies explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. His recent work continues to focus on the history of state-sponsored residential segregation. Rothstein earned his BA from Harvard College.

updated 2025