Mentorship

Helping Others Reach Their Potential

In recognition of her commitment to mentoring, the Law & Society Association has honored Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig with the 2023 Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award.

She offered Gowder advice on navigating the social and professional dynamics that can challenge anyone entering academia, particularly as faculty of color in a world where bias still runs rampant. She told him what he could expect and how he could approach his next steps. More than anything, she let him know that she was on his side.

“If you don’t have a lot of preexisting mentors, just to have somebody reach out to you and say, ‘I know you exist and I’m rooting for you,’ is really transformative,” Gowder says.

At various points early in his career, Gowder considered leaving legal academia, but Onwuachi-Willig’s mentorship offered him what he needed to keep going.

Gowder, now professor and associate dean of research and intellectual life at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, is one of many law professors whose careers have advanced due to Onwuachi-Willig’s guidance and support over the years—work for which she has been named the recipient of the Law and Society Association’s 2023 Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award.

“She remembers what it’s like to be new at this business and not quite sure how things work,” Gowder says. “She’s been a resource for so many generations of young faculty, especially faculty of color. I cannot think of a single person in the legal academy more deserving of a mentorship award.”

In addition to countless individual relationships in which she has advised young faculty on their scholarship, job applications, and academic careers, Onwuachi-Willig is also the founder and organizer of the Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop, which has spent 16 years promoting and supporting the advancement of Black women law professors and aspiring law professors in the legal academy.

Participants at the 16th Annual Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop | Photo by Luguzy Atkins

“I have been incredibly fortunate to benefit from the mentorship of many people throughout my life, and that’s why mentoring others is so important to me,” Onwuachi-Willig says. “Knowing the rules and understanding how to navigate your way through different spaces is a huge advantage in your career, and we all have a responsibility to pass on the lessons we have learned. As a woman and a person of color, as someone who understands the structural barriers that exist for those who have traditionally been marginalized in our profession, I feel that responsibility very deeply.”

Catherine Smith, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, says Onwuachi-Willig changed her career by encouraging her to use her life experiences to inform her writing without questioning its value as legal scholarship.

“Angela saying, ‘This is legitimate,’ set me on a different course,” Smith says. “It let me be my authentic self in an environment that doesn’t necessarily embrace that because it’s been so homogenous for so long.”

Onwuachi-Willig is also a co-organizer of the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum, now in its fifth year, which offers commentary, critique, and advice to junior scholars in the field from senior professors interested in equality law. Through the BU Summer Pre-Law Academy, a four-week program aimed at alleviating some of the undue burden placed on aspiring law students who are people of color and first-generation college students, she has helped future law students prepare for their academic careers. And she has led the development of ASPIRE (Antiracist Scholars for Progress, Innovation, and Racial Equity), a scholarship program at BU Law focused on facilitating the growth of antiracist leaders in the profession.

Nia Johnson (’19) was a third-year law student when she was encouraged by a professor to share her work with Onwuachi-Willig, who offered feedback and support that helped Johnson on the path to becoming a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law in just a few short years.

“It takes a very specific type of person to see potential in people,” Johnson says. “A lot of folks like to see the fully developed form. Angela has the ability to see students who are still nascent for what they can be.”

Onwuachi-Willig says she was honored to receive the Law and Society Association’s award.

“It has been a great pleasure to watch these fantastic academics grow and thrive in their own careers,” she says. “That has been a joy in itself. The formal recognition is the icing on top of the cake.”