������

wasn’t sure she wanted to become a lawyer until, as a college student, she watched Cheryl Mills, then–White House deputy counsel, defend President Bill Clinton during televised impeachment proceedings. “I was captivated by her everything,” Wilson remembers. “Her presence as a Black woman and how she was able to command attention from the floor of the Senate was very powerful to me.”

This summer, Wilson joined ������ Law’s faculty as a professor of law after 13 years at the University of North Carolina School of Law (UNC), where she was a Wade Edwards Distinguished Scholar. With her comes the Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic that she founded at UNC, which focuses on applying critical race theory to civil rights practice. In her scholarship, Wilson explores the nexus of civil rights, inequality, and education law in innovative ways. When the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent cited Wilson’s 2021 article in the Harvard Law Review, which uses an antitrust law lens to examine the harmful sociopolitical consequences of segregated school districts in racially diverse cities.

“She’s a brilliant scholar,” says Deborah Weissman, Reef C. Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC. “She’s also very courageous because she has litigated in places in North Carolina that would much rather not see her and her students coming. These are areas that are not particularly friendly to civil rights issues. But she’s had great outcomes for her clients and for the community.”

Reared in Las Vegas, Wilson earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern California and her JD at UCLA School of Law, where she was one of only five Black students in her entering class. “One of the things that I loved about law school was the intellectual rigor. But it was also just really weird and disconcerting to be talking about Brown v. Board of Education in constitutional law or, in criminal law, People v. Goetz—which raises the question of whether it’s reasonable to fear Black teenagers on the subway—given the racial demographics,” says Wilson. “It deepened my belief and my suspicions that the way society was structured was deeply unfair, and that our laws had something to do with that.”

After law school, Wilson worked as a litigation associate at Arnold & Porter and as George N. Lindsay Staff Attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Two of her law school professors encouraged her to pursue teaching. At UNC, she founded the Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic after noticing that clinic students had shied away from considering whether racial discrimination might be a relevant factor in a housing case. “That made me think it might be important for us to teach students how to lawyer in a race-conscious way, which helps them to be better advocates,” Wilson says.

Wilson noticed that clinic students shied away from considering whether racial discrimination might be an issue in a housing case. “That made me think it might be important for us to teach students how to lawyer in a race-conscious way, which helps them to be better advocates.” 

Among the clinic’s recent successes was litigation against the city of Graham, North Carolina, and the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office over an incident in which deputies used pepper spray at a get-out-the-vote rally. In May, the defendants agreed to pay the 15 plaintiffs a $256,000 settlement. “The breadth of her skills is impressive,” says plaintiff Jamie Paulen of Wilson. “She is also very kind and takes her job very seriously, as in all parts of it.”

At ������ Law, Wilson says she will be seeking opportunities “to reinvent and reformulate” how law can support marginalized communities at a time when civil rights law is under significant pressure. “Other people have already done this. They’ve either been in these shoes or were in a worse position than I am right now, but I still get to drink the water from the well that they dug,” she says.

“And so it’s important in this moment,” Wilson adds, “as the water gets turned off and we have to dig new wells, that I be one of the people who continues to dig and get the calluses on my hands. Hopefully, whoever comes after me can drink from the new well that I helped to dig, no matter what challenges I face.” —Curtis Stephen

Photo by Eamon Queeney