Kerry Abrams

Abrams's scholarship focuses on the areas of immigration law and citizenship, family law, and gender and law. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited a 2013 article by Abrams in her dissenting opinion in Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett.

Abrams served as acting assistant professor of lawyering at New York University School of Law from 2002 to 2005. She then joined the faculty of the University of Virginia Law School in 2005, working as a professor and later as the University's Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. Abrams became the fifteenth Dean of Duke Law School in July 2018.

Abrams grew up in Edmonds, Washington, with a schoolteacher mother and engineer father. She attended Swarthmore College, graduating with a BA in English with Highest Honors in 1993. Prior to attending Stanford Law School, she worked as an assistant at St. Martin's Press, a church organist, a secretary, and a department store clerk. During law school, she served as president of the Moot Court Board and the co-chair of Women of Stanford Law. She also worked as a research assistant for Professor Janet Halley. Abrams earned a JD at Stanford in 1998, in a graduating class that included other future law school deans Gillian Lester (Columbia) and Kimberly Yuracko (formerly dean at Northwestern).

Karen L. "Kerry" Abrams (born 1971) is an American law professor and academic administrator. She currently serves as the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the Duke University School of Law.