The daughter of American civil rights activists, Professor Doris “Wendy” Greene is a trailblazing U.S. anti-discrimination law scholar, teacher, and advocate who has devoted her professional life’s work to advancing racial, color, and gender equity in workplaces and beyond. She is the first (and only) tenured African American woman law professor at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law and the Director of the Kline Law Center for Law, Policy, and Social Action. Professor Greene’s award-winning publications and public advocacy have generated civil rights protections for countless individuals who experience discrimination in various spheres.

At Drexel Kline School of Law, Professor Greene teaches Employment Law, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, Race and Law, Legislation and Regulation, alongside specialized courses on grooming and appearance discrimination. She is a highly sought-after speaker, commentator, and consultant in the U.S. and abroad on myriad matters related to civil and human rights law and policy including organizational and corporate governance, identity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Frequently, Greene provides legal commentary on these issues to media outlets such as The Washington Post, PBS News, BBC News, NBC News, ABC News and the New York Times.

A visionary scholar-activist, Professor Greene’s scholarship sheds light on how notions of identity shape the scope of civil rights protections—and often leave people unprotected by law when their civil rights are violated. Professor Greene has illuminated this state of affairs most notably in her portfolio of publications examining what she has coined as “misperception discrimination” and “grooming codes discrimination”: two legal constructs that are now recognized in civil rights discourse, theory, and praxis. Her internationally recognized publications advancing substantive protections for people subjected to these and other forms of inequality have shaped corporate policies and practices as well as the enforcement stance of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), administrative law judges, federal courts, and civil rights organizations.

The 11th Circuit and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals endorsed Professor Greene’s published definition of race as a legal authority on the social construction of race and as a practicable definition for constitutional decision-making respectively. In fact, iterations of the definition of race she proposed in her 2008 article, “Title VII: What’s Hair (and Other Race-Based Characteristics) Got to Do with It?”, are being adopted in history-making civil rights legislation popularly known as the C.R.O.W.N. Acts (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Acts): the first laws in the nation to expressly declare discrimination African descendants encounter based upon their natural hairstyles such as afros, twists, locs, and braids is racial discrimination.

One of the nation’s leading legal experts on this global civil rights issue, Teen Vogue, Now This News, BBC World News, The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, World Afro Day, the Association of American Law Schools, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, among others have celebrated Professor Greene for her pioneering scholarly-activism in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Greene is a legal architect of the federal C.R.O.W.N. Act (which the U.S. House of Representatives has passed twice) and the Founder of the #FreeTheHair movement whose civil rights scholarship and advocacy have been featured in “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO. For decades, Greene has advanced African descendants’ human rights to be free from racial and cultural discrimination globally—across four continents and before White House officials; the United States Congress; state and municipal legislatures throughout the U.S.; the United Nations; the French Parliament; and the House of Commons (England). She has also served as a legal expert in landmark civil rights cases challenging the policing of African descendants and their natural hairstyles in schools and workplaces. Notably, Professor Greene’s legal expertise informed a seminal ruling in Arnold v. Barbers Hill Independent School District; crediting Greene’s testimony, the federal district court held that the school district’s enforcement of its grooming policy—compelling Black male students’ to cut off their locs as a condition of matriculation—infringed upon the students’ First Amendment rights to express their cultural and racial identity.

Deeply devoted to public and professional service, Professor Greene serves as a Co-Chair of the African American Affairs Committee for the American Bar Association Civil Rights and Social Justice (CRSJ) and as a Commissioner for the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Legal Profession. She, too, is a member of the Executive Board of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination and the Executive Board of the AALS Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law.

A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Professor Greene is a graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana (Bachelor of Arts cum laude with Honors in English and a double-minor in African American Studies and Spanish). She also earned a Juris Doctor from Tulane University School of Law and a Master of Law (LL.M.) from The George Washington University School of Law where she specialized in anti-discrimination law, comparative slavery and race relations law in the Americas and Caribbean.