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Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Highlights

  • 2006 AALS Derrick A. Bell Award, American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Minority Section, for a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice
  • According to Our Hearts: Lessons on Race, Family, and Law From Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (under contract with Yale University Press)
  • Chair, AALS Minority Groups Section
  • Chair-Elect, Law and Humanities Section
  • Chair, CRT20 (2009) National Planning Committee

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Professor of Law
Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Scholar

Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Professor of Law and the Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Scholar at the University of Iowa. During the fall of 2009, she is a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where she majored in American Studies and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, a Note Editor on the Michigan Law Review, and an Associate Editor of the founding issue of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. After law school, Professor Onwuachi-Willig clerked for the Honorable Solomon Oliver, Jr., United States District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio, and the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore, United States Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She also practiced law as a litigation and employment attorney at Jones Day in Cleveland, Ohio, and as an employment attorney with Foley Hoag LLP in Boston, Massachusetts.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig joined the University of Iowa College of Law faculty in 2006 after three years on the tenure track at the University of California, Davis School of Law (King Hall). Her research and teaching interests include family law, employment discrimination, race and the law, feminist legal theory, and evidence. Her recent publications have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Harvard Civil Liberties Civil Rights Law Review, and the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice. Currently, she is a writing a book on Rhinelander v. Rhinelander that examines and analyzes its historical and contemporary lessons about how law and society function together to frame the normative ideal of family as monoracial.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig has published numerous opinion-editorials in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, Sacramento Bee, Des Moines Register, and Iowa City Press Citizen. In the summer of 2008, she received an Obermann Interdisciplinary Grant to complete collaborative research with two sociologists at the University of Iowa, Professors Mary Campbell and Mary Noonan; their joint research explores the under-representation of minority—American Indian, Asian Pacific American, African American, and Latina/o— attorneys at both the associate and partnership levels of law firms within the United States.

In 2006, Professor Onwuachi-Willig was honored for her service by the Minority Groups Section of the Association of American Law Schools with the Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. Professor Onwuachi-Willig is the Chair of the AALS Minority Groups Section, Chair-Elect of the AALS Law and Humanities Section, and a member of the Society of American Law Teachers ("SALT") Board of Governors.

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