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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 who studies the historical development of poverty, food insecurity, and environmental injustice in the U.S. political economy. Drawing on critical legal theory, his scholarship examines the relationship among race, culture, and modern social movements as they confront private law’s ordering of the U.S. economy. He teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, and Critical Legal History.

Toussaint’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in leading scholarly journals, 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 been published or are forthcoming in leading online law journals, including the Virginia Law Review Online, UCLA Law Review Discourse, and Columbia Law Review Forum. His scholarship has been competitively selected for presentations at conferences and workshops across the country, including the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, the Georgetown University Law Center’s Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop, and The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Junior Faculty Business & Financial Law Workshop.

Professor Toussaint has been nationally recognized for his teaching, scholarship, and service. In 2024, he was awarded the National Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Award. In 2023, he was elected as a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and received both a Faculty Scholarship Award and a 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 was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Neophyte Law Professor Award. At UDC Law, he taught Contracts, Business Organizations, 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. Professor Toussaint began his legal career as a project finance associate with the international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP. Subsequently, he served as a Law & Policy Fellow with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C., focusing on fair housing law and policy. Toussaint 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. Toussaint 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 a National Executive Board Member of the National Black Law Students Association as the National Director of the Nelson Mandela International Negotiations Competition.

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. Toussaint currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy. He also sits on the Executive Board of the AALS Professional Responsibility Section, Business Associations Section, and Minority Section (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 Engine of Racial Capitalism
  • The Unequal Protection of Black Farmers
  • 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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