Buckley Institute Announces Fifth Annual Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize Winner

The Buckley Institute announced that Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver is the Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize winner for 2026. Buckley has awarded the $10,000 prize annually since 2022. It honors Yale faculty who go above and beyond to create a classroom environment conducive to open inquiry.

Professor Driver stood out among more than 115 nominations for encouraging students to engage with controversial subjects across the political spectrum. Kevin Xiao ’23 LAW ’27 observed that “on topics like race-based affirmative action to abortion rights, Professor Driver not only allowed heterodox viewpoints to flourish in the classroom but also encouraged students with right-leaning viewpoints to speak up and take a stand.”

Driver’s past students pointed out his conscious effort to engage with and understand conservative students. Carlos Garcia Perez LAW ’27 said Driver is “a beacon of intellectual curiosity and diversity of thought” who “never presented strawmen nor dismissed out-of-hand classic conservative arguments.” Garcia Perez added that he “will be forever thankful” to Driver “for instilling a presumption of good faith that allowed me and my liberal and conservative classmates to communicate and build bridges, and strong friendships.”

The Faculty Prize

In recognition of Professor Driver’s unwavering support for open dialogue and debate in the classroom, the Buckley Institute will award him a commemorative plaque and a $10,000 prize during an awards ceremony this fall. During the ceremony, Professor Driver will give a lecture with a reception to follow. Stay tuned for additional details on time and location.

Previous winners of the Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize include Yale Lecturers Daniel Schillinger, Gregory Collins, and Mordechai Levy-Eichel, and Yale Law Professor Amy Chua.

To watch past Faculty Prize lectures and learn more about the prize, click here!

Biography

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the field of constitutional law and is the author of The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education, which was selected as an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review.

A Guggenheim Fellow, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Driver served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. A recipient of the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, Driver has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews. He has also written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. 

His first book—The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind—was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review. The Schoolhouse Gate also received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. 

Before joining the Yale faculty, Driver taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, and the Westville Correctional Facility of Indiana. He is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school), and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, Driver served as a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and at the Supreme Court of the United States.