Krislov was born in
Lexington, Kentucky, to a
Jewish family in 1960. A 1982
Yale College graduate with a degree in political science and winner of the
Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, he attended
Magdalen College, Oxford as a
Rhodes scholar. He then returned to New Haven to attend
Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the
Yale Law Journal. He began his law career as a clerk for Judge
Marilyn Hall Patel of the
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in
San Francisco. From 1989 to 1993, he served in an honors program at the
U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting cases involving
police brutality and racial violence. He then spent three years at the
White House Counsel's office before moving to the
U.S. Department of Labor, where he served as Acting
Solicitor of Labor until leaving the office to become vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan. In 1998, he became the first person to serve as both vice president and general counsel at the
University of Michigan. As general counsel to the university, he dispensed legal services on matters ranging from
defending affirmative action to appealing penalties levied against the
Michigan Wolverines basketball team by the
National Collegiate Athletic Association. Krislov led the defense of University of Michigan in
Gratz vs Bollinger in which the United States Supreme Court upheld appeals and lower court findings that the university's admissions practices based on race were unconstitutional although upholding the concepts of affirmative action in admissions. He is a member of a variety of academic service organizations, including the
American Anthropological Association's Project Advisory Board on Race and Human Variation, the Michigan Rhodes Scholars Selection Committee, and the Executive Committee of the University of Michigan Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations. Krislov was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities at the
National Endowment for the Humanities in November 2009. Krislov's community service activities include leadership positions in the Washtenaw County Jewish Foundation and the
United Way of Washtenaw County, as well as membership on boards of arts organizations including the
Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit and the
University Musical Society. He also served as an
alderman in
New Haven shortly after graduating from Yale. ==Family==