Professor Allison Orr Larsen Honored with 2025 Walter L. Williams, Jr., Memorial Teaching Award
Each year, the graduating class selects the recipient of the Walter L. Williams, Jr. Memorial Teaching Award in memory of the late Walter L. Williams, Jr., an outstanding teacher, and member of the faculty from 1972 to 1991.
This year’s recipient is Allison Orr Larsen, the Alfred Wilson & Mary I.W. Lee Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for the Bill of Rights Law. Professor Larsen teaches courses in constitutional law, administrative law, and statutory interpretation.
Since joining the William & Mary faculty in 2010, Larsen has received many awards honoring her teaching and scholarship, including: the university’s Alumni Fellowship Award, the 1L Professor of the Year award, two university-wide Plumeri awards, the inaugural McGlothlin Teaching Award and the state-wide outstanding faculty award in the “rising star” category. In 2013, she even took home her first Walter L. Williams, Jr. Memorial Teaching Award.
Larsen is highly regarded across the nation as “a truly exceptional scholar.” In addition, her name comes up again and again when students and alumni mention a faculty member who has challenged, encouraged, and inspired them.
Larsen is a Charlottesville, Va., native and magna cum laude graduate of William & Mary. She finished first in a class of 360 students at the University of Virginia School of Law. She served as a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in the appellate litigation division of O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C., she began her academic career as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Catholic University School of Law.
In recent years, Larsen has been the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University.