Celia Bigoness, a former Cornell Law School professor with extensive experience in corporate practice, has joined the University of Virginia School of Law, where she will direct the John W. Glynn Jr. Law & Business Program. The school announced the appointment on 6 July 2026. Our congratulations to her and to the program.
"Celia is the ideal leader for the Glynn Law & Business Program in this moment," said Dean Leslie Kendrick. "Her extensive experience in corporate law and international finance, combined with her depth in teaching law students and building a well-rounded business program, are unmatched."
An unusual path to the classroom
Bigoness came to law by way of journalism. After Harvard, she took an editing job at Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000, and was walking to its New York newsroom, two miles from Ground Zero, on 11 September 2001. She went on to Yale Law School, expecting to return to foreign policy, but "wound up falling in love with the practice of law" during a summer at Sullivan & Cromwell. She joined the firm after graduating in 2006, working on international project finance in New York and London, until the 2008 financial crisis, as she puts it, made the liquidity her practice depended on "just go away." She joined the Cornell Law faculty in 2014 and, in 2018, founded its Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, later expanding it to New York City through a named center she led.
What she will build at UVA
At Virginia, Bigoness will lead a program aimed squarely at a legal market in flux. She plans to prepare students for "the evolving, rapidly changing law firm marketplace," including the growing use of artificial intelligence in transactional practice, while insisting that the fundamentals come first. Her approach, she said, is to make sure students have "the essential legal building blocks in place, then we're going to start to incorporate technology into it." She will teach the Introduction to Law and Business course and is designing a new contract-drafting course focused on AI tools. "We are not looking to turn out the same law graduate that we were looking to turn out five or 10 years ago," she said.
For UVA law students
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Sources
This report is based on the announcement published by the University of Virginia School of Law. Quotations are drawn from that announcement.
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