Dr. Tonya Brito

Biography

Tonya L. Brito is the George H. Young Chair Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and is a Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty. She served as the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development from 2014 to 2016 and was the Director of the Institute for Legal Studies from 2013 to 2016. During her tenure as ILS Director, she organized numerous academic conferences and speaker series, developed the ILS Law Society Graduate Fellows Program, and launched the Wednesday Workshop series for internal works-in-progress. Her research interests encompass access to civil justice, family law policy, law and inequality, socio-legal studies, and qualitative research methods. A nationally recognized expert in child support law and policy, Professor Brito has published extensively in this area. She has led a multi-year empirical study on the experiences of low-income civil litigants in family court, with support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Notably, in 2016, she received an Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the Law Society Association for her scholarly article on Race, Racism, and Law. She has also received the Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award from both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin System in 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at UW, Professor Brito served as a judicial law clerk for Judge John Garrett Penn and practiced complex civil litigation at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C. She obtained her A.B. with honors from Barnard College and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Research Interests

Courses