Derrick Bell is one of the most highly respected constitutional law professors in America. His civil-rights career began when Thurgood Marshall recruited him fresh out of law school. He was the first African American to be tenured at Harvard Law School, as well as the only academic to relinquish a coveted tenured position to protest Harvard Law School's failure to appoint women of color. He served as the dean of the University of Oregon Law School and again resigned when the faculty refused to hire a qualified Asian-American woman. He has received six honorary degrees in the last decade and currently teaches constitutional law at NYU law school where the annual New York University School of Law Derrick Bell Lecture Series was established in his honor. He has also been honored as the Annual Tobriner Memorial Lecturer, the UC Davis Edward L. Barrett, Jr., Lecturer on Constitutional Law, and has been voted Teacher of the Year by the Society of American Law Teachers.

His legal articles have appeared in such prestigious journals as Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, NYU Review of Law and Social Change, Hastings Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, University of Michigan Law Review, and Howard University Law Journal. He has been published or featured in The New York Times, Essence, USA Today, Time magazine, People, Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the Village Voice, the Houston Chronicle, and the Baltimore Sun, to name a few. He has also appeared on such national television programs as The Charlie Rose Show, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and on the cable networks C-SPAN and CNN.

He is the author of seven books, including The New York Times bestseller Faces at the Bottom of the Well; Afrolantica Legacies; Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home; Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester; And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice; Race, Racism and American Law; and Constitutional Conflicts.

Race, Racism, and American Law (4th ed. 2000)
And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987)
Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992)
Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester (1994)
Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home (1996)
Afrolantica Legacies (1997)
Ethical Ambition, author.