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Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Highlights

  • Selected to be Fellow of American Bar Foundation
  • Iowa Supreme Court Finalist, January 2011
  • Elected to the American Law Institute, December 2010
  • 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 Committee for the Recruitment and Retention of Minorities

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law

Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She joined the Iowa Law faculty in 2006 after three years on the tenure track at the University of California, Davis School of Law. She graduated from Grinnell College, 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, she clerked for the Honorable Solomon Oliver, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio, and the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She also worked as a labor and employment associate at both Jones Day in Cleveland, Ohio, and Foley Hoag in Boston, Massachusetts.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig researches and writes in Employment Discrimination, Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Race and the Law. Her recent articles have appeared in many of the most prestigious law journals, including the Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, to name a few. Professor Onwuachi-Willig also has published numerous opinion-editorials in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, Sacramento Bee, Des Moines Register, and Iowa City Press Citizen. Currently, she is a writing a book entitled According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family. This book uses the Rhinelander case as a springboard for examining and analyzing the case’s historical and contemporary lessons about how law and society function together to frame the normative ideal of family as monoracial.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig is a past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Minority Groups Section and Law and Humanities Section. She currently serves as the Chair of the AALS Committee for the Recruitment and Retention of Minorities.

In 2006, Professor Onwuachi-Willig was honored for her service by the Minority Groups Section of the AALS 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. In 2010, she was elected to the American Law Institute, and in January of 2011, she was selected as one of nine finalists for three openings on the Iowa Supreme Court. She recently was invited to be a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2011.


 
 

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