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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

Background

Etienne C. Toussaint is Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. A private law scholar, he 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 race 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. His scholarship also explores how literature, art, and Afrofuturist thought can reshape legal meaning and expand the boundaries of legal imagination. He teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Secured Transactions, Law and Political Economy, and The Reconstruction Constitution.

Professor Toussaint is the author of numerous articles on law, political economy, and Afrofuturism published or forthcoming in leading law reviews, including the Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, NYU Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, and Columbia Human Rights Law Review. His Afrofuturism scholarship includes “Afrofuturism at Work,” 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1491 (2024); “Afrofuturism in Protest,” 125 Columbia Law Review 1375 (2025); and “After the Comet: Du Bois, Afrofuturism, and Constitutional Renewal,” 101 NYU Law Review 1120 (2026). His chapter, “Before the Aliens Arrive: Derrick Bell, Afrofuturism, and the Diagnostic Register of Black Speculative Thought,” is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Afrofuturism in 2028, and he co-convened the 2023 Georgetown Law Journal symposium on Afrofuturism and the Law. His shorter essays have appeared in the Virginia Law Review Online, UCLA Law Review Discourse, Columbia Law Review Forum, and Villanova Law Review. With Gregory S. Parks, he is also co-editing Prophets of Rage: Public Enemy, Critical Race Theory, and the Sound of Legal Resistance, which Cornell University Press has provisionally accepted.

Professor Toussaint has received national recognition for his scholarship, teaching, and service. In 2026, he received the University of South Carolina Educational Foundation Research Award for Professional Schools, one of the university’s Russell Research Awards, which are among its highest honors for research and scholarship. In 2025, he received the Eboni S. Nelson Faculty Member of the Year Award from the Matthew J. Perry Black Law Students Association at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law. He received the National Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Award in 2024, was elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2023, and received the Society of American Law Teachers’ Junior Great Teacher Award in 2022. He was also 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 in 2021.

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 small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and cooperative housing associations throughout the nation’s capital. He began his legal career as a project finance associate with 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 a Ronald McNair Scholar and Alpha Phi Alpha Distinguished Collegiate. He earned an M.S.E. in Environmental Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Professor Toussaint serves as President of the John Mercer Langston Group, Inc., and on the Executive Committees of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Minority Groups, which he chaired from 2024 to 2026, and Section on Agricultural and Food Law. He previously served on the Executive Committees of the AALS Sections on Business Associations and Professional Responsibility, and on the boards and advisory bodies of organizations including the Washington Council of Lawyers, the National Black Law Students Association, and the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy.

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 sons.

Education

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

Teaching

  • Contract Law (LAWS 504)
  • Business Associations (LAWS 609)
  • Secured Transactions (LAWS 615)
  • Law and Political Economy (Seminar) (LAWS 743)
  • The Reconstruction Constitution (Seminar) (LAWS 764)
  • Critical Legal History (Reading Group)
  • Dignity Law (Reading Group)

Selected Scholarship

  • Energy Oligarchy and Dignitary Harm in the American South (Article)
  • Racial Capitalism and Environmental Racism in the Mississippi Delta (Article)"
  • The City as Freedom (Article)
  • The Enduring Paradox of Ideological Origins (Historigraphical Essay)
  • Discredited Knowledge: Professionalism, Leadership, and the Ethics of Public Citizenship (Essay)
  • Born on Beale Street: James Baldwin and the Afrofuturist Politics of Love (Essay)
  • Digital Resistance and Afrofuturist Futures (Book Chapter in Prophets of Rage)
  • "Another Place, Another Way": Octavia Butler and the Timing of Reconstruction (Book Chapter)
  • The Hidden Tax: Addressing Hair Discrimination in the Legal Profession (Book Chapter)
  • Second Sight: The Black Radical Tradition and Constitutional Time (Book)
  • Prophets of Rage: Public Enemy, Critical Race Theory, and the Sound of Legal Resistance, edited by Etienne C. Toussaint and Gregory S. Parks, Cornell University Press (provisionally accepted). 
  • 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).

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