Kevin Washburn served as dean of the College of Law from 2018 through 2024. He previously served as the dean and Regents Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to be the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior. He served in that role until 2016.

Washburn is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. He earned a BA from the University of Oklahoma and a JD from the Yale Law School. Prior to entering academia, he clerked for a judge on the Ninth Circuit, worked as a trial attorney and then a prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, and served as the general counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. As an academic, he has held faculty positions at Minnesota and Arizona, and taught for a year as a visitor at Harvard. He has taught and published casebooks in specialty subjects, primarily the law of gaming and gambling and federal Indian law. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law and author of numerous articles on federal criminal justice in Indian country, Indian gaming, and other issues relevant to federal Indian law. He is on research leave for the spring semester of 2025.

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Practice and Teaching: 

• Criminal Law
• Contracts
• Property 
• Constitutional Law
• Federal Jurisdiction
• Administrative Law