Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Biography

Angela Onwuachi-Willig is dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. A renowned legal scholar and expert in critical race theory, employment discrimination, and family law, she joined the law school as dean in August 2018.

Before joining the School of Law, Dean Onwuachi-Willig served as Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Previously, she taught 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 acting (assistant) professor of law. As a classroom teacher at her previous institutions, she taught employment discrimination, evidence, family law, critical race theory, and torts.

Dean Onwuachi-Willig is an elected member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Law Institute (ALI), American Bar Foundation, as well as the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. She is the author of According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale 2013). Her articles have appeared in leading law journals such as the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, to name a few.

Onwuachi-Willig is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Michael A. Olivas Award for Outstanding Leadership and Mentoring in the Legal Academy (2024), the Law and Society Association’s Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award (2023), the Society of American Law Teacher’s M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award (2022), the Fred Zacharias Award, given by the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility to the best academic writing in the field (2022), the EXTRAordinary Woman in Boston Award (2019), the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Clyde Ferguson Award (2015), the AALS Derrick Bell Award (2006), Law and Society’s John Hope Franklin Prize (2018), the University of Iowa Collegiate Teaching Award (2016), the Gertrude Rush Award (2016) from the Iowa Organization of Women Attorneys and the Iowa Chapter of the National Bar Association, the AALS Clyde Ferguson Award (2015), and the AALS Derrick Bell Award (2006), to name a few. Along with her coauthor Mario Barnes, she is the first faculty member to win both the Ferguson and Bell Awards. In the 2017–18 academic year, Onwuachi-Willig served as the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation. In 2021, she and four black women decanal colleagues were selected to be the inaugural recipients of the AALS Impact Award in recognition of the extraordinary work they performed in collating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project in January 2021.

Onwuachi-Willig received the 2016 Collegiate Teaching Award at the University of Iowa College of Law and the 2012 Marion Huit Award, a University of Iowa award given to a faculty member in recognition of outstanding teaching and assistance to students, exceptional research and writing, and dedicated service to the University and the surrounding community. Other honors include her selection as a finalist for the Supreme Court of Iowa in 2011; identification by the National Law Journal as one of the “Minority 40 under 40” in 2011 and by Lawyers of Color as one of the “50 Law Professors of Color Under 50” in its inaugural list in 2013; and election to the Iowa Bar Foundation.

Dean Onwuachi-Willig serves on the Grinnell College Board of Trustees, the Law School Admissions Council Board, the Purple Campaign to End Sexual Harassment Advisory Board, and the Board and Executive Committee of the Law and Society Association. She serves on Senators Warren and Markey’s Judicial Selection and U.S. Attorney Selection Committees; is a member of the AALS Law Deans Section Executive Committee, the AALS Deans Steering Committee, and the Law Deans Advisory Committee to U.S. News and World Report; serves on the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) Standing Committee on Lawyer Well-Being while chairing the Law School Subcommittee; and chairs the SJC Committee on Character and Fitness. She also served as the the chair for AALS Committee on the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers and Students for two years, leading the committee as it drafted and developed an official Statement of Good Practices on the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers. She also is 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 its participants and has assisted dozens of women on the path to tenure.

 Onwuachi-Willig graduated from Grinnell College, Phi Beta Kappa, and 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. After law school, she clerked for US District Court Judge Solomon Oliver of the Northern District of Ohio and US Sixth Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore. She received her PhD in sociology and African American studies from Yale University. She has practiced law as a labor and employment associate at Jones Day in Cleveland, Ohio and Foley Hoag in Boston, Massachusetts.

Media Inquiries: Kim Miragliuolo kmira@bu.edu