Alyson Drake
Assistant Professor of Law
Director, Law Library
Assistant Dean for Legal Research Services
Director, Initiative for Evidence-Based Legal Education
B.A., Nazareth College
M.L.I.S., University of Maryland, College Park
J.D., William & Mary Law School
Alyson Drake is an Assistant Professor of Law, the Assistant Dean for Legal Research Services, and the Founding Director of the Initiative for Evidence-Based Legal Education at the University of Houston Law Center. Her areas of expertise include evidence-based legal education, cognitive science, and experiential education. As Assistant Dean for Legal Research Services, Drake directs the daily operations of the University of Houston Law Center Library. As Founding Director of the Initiative for Evidence-Based Legal Education, Drake leads a team of educators and scholars nationwide as they work to research and advance the use of evidence-based teaching strategies in legal education.
Professor Drake teaches Intermediate Legal Research at the Law Center and coordinates with the Lawyering Skills & Strategies faculty to teach legal research to first-year law students. This research program won a 2024 Bloomberg Law School Innovation Program Honorable Mention for Changing Pedagogy.
Before joining the University of Houston Law Center, Professor Drake served as the Instructional Services Librarian at Fordham University, the Assistant Director of Operations & Educational Programs at Texas Tech University, and Reference Librarian at the University of South Carolina and taught courses including Foreign, Comparative, & International Legal
Research, Advanced Legal Research, Public Interest Legal Research, and more. At Texas Tech, Drake was awarded the Black Law Students Association Professor of the Year, the Hispanic Law Student Professor of the Year, and was selected as a fellow for the Institute of Inclusive Excellence.
Drake has published articles and chapters in leading legal and law librarianship journals and publications, such as Law Library Journal, Buffalo Law Review, and the award-winning Integrating Doctrine and Diversity series from Carolina Academic Press. Drake is a member of the American Association of Law Libraries, where she has served as the chair of the Research Instruction & Patron Services Special Interest Section. She is one of the founders of the Teaching the Teachers Conference for Law Librarians and architect of the Teaching the Teachers Beginners’ Bootcamp, and she was named one of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Emerging Leaders for 2022.
