Melvin I. Urofsky is Professor of Law & Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of History at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Before joining VCU as chair of the History Department in 1974, he taught at the Ohio State University (1964-1967) and the State University of New York at Albany (1967-1974). In 1990-91 he was James Pinckney Harrison Visiting Professor of History at the College of William & Mary. From 1995 until his semi-retirement in 2003, he served as the director of the doctoral program in Public Policy & Administration. He is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., and also teaches an occasional course or seminar at VCU.

He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia. Over the years he has held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the American Historical Association and others. He was a Rich Fellow at Oxford University’s Center for Jewish Studies, a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of New South Wales Law School in Sydney, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center in Italy, and a visiting scholar at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. Under the auspices of the State Department he has lectured in Europe, Asia and Australia, and has spoken at many colleges and law schools in the United States. His book Supreme Decisions: Great Constitutional Cases and Their Impact, Combined Edition, Volumes I and II (2012) formed the basis for his contributions to Britannica.