Prof. Merritt E. McAlister

Merritt E. McAlister is the Interim Dean and Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor at Levin College of Law. She joined the UF Law faculty in 2018, and she was appointed interim dean in June 2023. Prior to her career in academia, Dean McAlister was a partner in the national appellate practice group of King & Spalding.

Dean McAlister clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge R. Lanier Anderson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She received her bachelor’s degree in English and Women and Gender Studies, magna cum laude, from Rice University and her law degree summa cum laude from the University of Georgia School of Law, where she served as Executive Articles Editor of the Georgia Law Review.

Dean McAlister teaches and writes in the areas of federal courts, judicial decision-making, constitutional law, and court administration. Her scholarship focuses on issues of institutional design in the federal appellate courts. Dean McAlister’s work has been published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review, among others. In 2020, she received the annual prize from the AALS Federal Courts Section for the best paper on federal courts by an untenured professor.