Helen Norton joined the Colorado Law faculty in 2007, after earlier serving as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and as the E. George Rudolph Distinguished Visiting Chair at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Her scholarly and teaching interests include constitutional law, civil rights, and employment discrimination law; she has been honored with the Excellence in Teaching Award on multiple occasions and was appointed a University of Colorado Presidential Teaching Scholar in 2014. She served as leader of President-elect Obama's transition team charged with reviewing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2008, and is frequently invited to testify before Congress and federal agencies on civil rights law and policy issues.
Before entering academia, Professor Norton served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she managed the Civil Rights Division's Employment Litigation, Educational Opportunities, and Coordination and Review Sections, and as Director of Legal and Public Policy at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she practiced appellate litigation and engaged in administrative and legislative advocacy on a range of employment and civil rights matters. She holds a J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, where she served as Associate Editor of the California Law Review, and a B.A. from Stanford University, where she graduated with distinction.