Selection of Dr. Angela Onwuachi-Willig as Dean of the BU School of Law
From Dr. Jean Morrison, University Provost and Chief Academic Officer
President Brown and I are very pleased to announce that following a national-level search, we have selected Dr. Angela Onwuachi-Willig as the next Dean of the BU School of Law.
Dr. Onwuachi-Willig is among the nation’s top scholars on law and inequality and has garnered widespread recognition for her writing and leadership on matters of employment discrimination, race, diversity, and family law. She joins Boston University from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she is Chancellor’s Professor of Law. She also holds distinction as the 2017-2018 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation.
A past finalist for the Supreme Court of Iowa, Dr. Onwuachi-Willig is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI), the American Bar Foundation (ABF), and the Iowa Bar Foundation, and has served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Employment Discrimination, Law & Humanities, and Minority Groups sections, and of its Committee on the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers and Students. She is additionally the founder of the Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop, which has resulted in the production of many books and hundreds of articles and essays by participants and has assisted dozens of women on the path to tenure. Previously, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law, where she was the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor and at the University of California, Davis, King Hall, where she was an Assistant Professor of Law.
Dr. Onwuachi-Willig is a high-impact teacher and scholar. She is the author of According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale 2013), which examines interracial marriage in both historic and current contexts, and has published extensively in leading law journals, including Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review. She has earned a host of important scholarly and professional distinctions. She has been identified by the National Law Journal as one of its “Minority 40 under 40” and by Lawyers of Color as one of the “50 Law Professors of Color Under 50″ and has won numerous national and state honors for community leadership and ongoing efforts in civil rights law. She also received AALS’s Clyde Ferguson and Derrick A. Bell awards, which each recognize outstanding contributions to legal education, mentorship, activism, and community service. Most recently, she received the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize, which recognizes exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law. Her work as a teacher has likewise been lauded with the University of Iowa College of Law’s 2016 Collegiate Teaching Award and the University of Iowa’s Marion Huit Award.
Dr. Onwuachi-Willig received her BA from Grinnell College, where she served as president of the alumni council and where she is currently a member of the Board of Trustees. She received her JD from the University of Michigan, where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, a Michigan Law Review Note Editor, and an Associate Editor for the founding issue of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. While serving on the faculty at the University of Iowa, she additionally received her MA, MPhil, and PhD in Sociology and African American Studies from Yale University. She is a member of the Ohio and Iowa bars and clerked for Chief Judge Solomon Oliver of Northern District of Ohio and U.S. Sixth Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore.
Her impressive record of scholarly accomplishments and leadership experience, combined with her compelling vision for the Boston University School of Law, make Dr. Onwuachi-Willig the ideal leader to advance BU Law to new levels of excellence. Following the completion of all formal University approval processes, including her professorial appointment, she will assume her role as dean on August 15, 2018. We are thrilled that we have recruited her to Boston University and look forward to welcoming Dr. Onwuachi-Willig this summer.
I also want to thank the members of the Search Advisory Committee for their efforts and deep engagement with this process, and to give special recognition to the School of Law faculty members on the Search Advisory Committee – Katharine Silbaugh, James Fleming, and David Walker, who served as Chair. I am grateful for their unwavering commitment and dedication to the search effort and to the School of Law.
Search Advisory Committee for the Dean of the Boston University School of Law
Chair:
David Walker, Professor of Law, School of Law
Members:
Ana Albuquerque, Associate Professor, Department of Accounting, Questrom School of Business
Ran Canetti, Professor, Department of Computer Science, College of Arts & Sciences
Neta Crawford, Professor, Department of Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences
James E. Fleming, The Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Intellectual Life, School of Law
Michael Grodin, Professor of Health Law, Ethics, & Human Rights, School of Public Health
Adil Najam, Dean, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies
Katharine Silbaugh, Professor of Law, School of Law
Selection of Dr. Angela Onwuachi-Willig as Dean of the BU School of Law – 5.24.2018