Lea VanderVelde

Lea VanderVelde is an American legal scholar and historian. She has written or co-authored several legal texts, and is a full professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. She obtained a BS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1974.

VanderVelde's research specializes in labor and employment law. She is a life fellow of the American Law Institute, as well as a member of the Wisconsin Bar and the Labor Law Group. In 2010, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies. She discovered the records of hundreds of freedom suits in St. Louis during research, and in 2014 published a book that analyzes twelve of them: Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott.

VanderVelde met children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi while his daughter attended UI; the two connected "over his passion for fighting slavery – one of her areas of research", and she visited his ashram during a three-week vacation in his native India.

VanderVelde lives in Iowa City. She has two children with her husband Johannes Ledolter.

Works (with Mark A. Rothstein) Human Resources and the Law (1994) Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (2014) (with Johannes Ledolter) Analyzing Textual Information: From Words to Meanings through Numbers (2021)