Each spring, University of Wisconsin Law School celebrates excellence in teaching through its Teacher of the Year awards. UW Law School’s annual teaching awards demonstrate the value placed on excellent teaching. Our faculty engage and inspire UW Law students through thoughtful pedagogy, and we are proud to honor them for this important work.
“One of the distinct pleasures I have as dean is working with great faculty and seeing the transformative effect they have on our students,” said Dean Dan Tokaji during an awards ceremony on March 14.
The honorees for outstanding classroom, clinical and adjunct instruction in 2024 include:
Lisa Washington, Classroom Teacher of the Year
Lisa Washington is an assistant professor and “an emerging legal leader in her field,” Tokaji said.
She is a prolific scholar whose work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the Chicago Law Review Online and the Yale Law Journal Forum.
She is the 2024 recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which acknowledges the best law review articles concerning sexual orientation and gender identity each year. She also received the Emerging Scholars Award from the American Association of Law Schools’ Section of Family and Juvenile Law.
“Professor Washington embodies the Law-in-Action tradition and the Wisconsin Idea by identifying and analyzing urgent social legal problems and using her strong intellect to come up with solutions or processes that extend beyond the boundaries of the state,” said Tokaji. “Not only is she a great legal scholar, but she is an excellent teacher. It is extremely rare for someone who has only served on the faculty for one academic year to win this award. It demonstrates her natural and extreme talent as a teacher that her students were so inspired to vote for her to win this honor so early in her teaching career.”
Prior to joining UW Law in 2023, Washington worked at The Bronx Defenders in New York City, where she was a fellow in the criminal defense practice and later became a staff attorney in the family defense practice. She also co-directed the Mainzer Family Defense Clinic at Cardozo School of Law and was a former Hastie Fellow, graduating from the program in 2022.
Emily Buchholz, Clinical Teacher of the Year
Emily Buchholz is a clinical associate professor and director of the Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic (L&E Clinic), which provides free legal services to nascent entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. The L&E Clinic is the Law School’s most popular and sought-after clinic by students, and each year it serves over 300 clients; about 75% of its former clients are still in business.
“If you have the good fortune of spending time with Professor Buchholz, you will find that she is a dynamic, approachable individual whose positive attitude and strong work ethic make her a great colleague and partner,” said Tokaji.
Her students agree, which is evident from the nominations.
One student wrote: “I’ve found Emily to be the most supportive of all my professors thus far at UW. As my supervising attorney for the clinic, she guided me without holding my hand and incorporated empathy into her legal work in a manner I had not previously encountered. I cannot speak more highly of Emily.”
“During my year in L&E and beyond, she has proven herself to be an excellent professor, mentor, director and human being,” wrote another student. “She has led the L&E Clinic through growth and success, securing government funding to continue the clinic’s success. She is an excellent person who is passionate about what she does.”
Prior to joining UW Law in 2022, Buchholz was executive director of the Corporate Institute at the University of Minnesota Law School. Prior to her career in higher education, Buchholz was a partner at a law firm in Minneapolis that worked with startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Brady Williamson, Adjunct Teacher of the Year
Brady Williamson was described by The Capital Times as “a towering figure in the Wisconsin legal community, and I cannot agree more,” said Tokaji. “He has been a great friend to UW Law School despite the fact he is not an alum of the school.” Williamson died earlier this year; he was 79.
Williamson’s teaching relationship with UW Law began in 1979 when newly elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson expressed to then-Dean Orrin Helstad that she felt Williamson, a young attorney and former congressional aide, would be a great person to teach at the Law School, explained Tokaji during the awards ceremony. This resulted in Williamson teaching at UW Law School for over four decades in the areas of election and constitutional law. He also served as a trusted counselor to the Kastenmeier and Fairchild lecture committees.
A skilled constitutional and corporate litigator, Williamson was a shareholder at Godfrey & Kahn; he often appeared in federal and state appellate courts and successfully represented clients before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was also involved in constitutional and election projects in West Africa, Iraq, Southern Sudan, Egypt and Bangladesh.
“It is my understanding he balanced his successful litigation practice with his international travels to assist in drafting new national and regular constitutions in several different countries,” Tokaji continued.
This was Williamson’s second time receiving this honor. The first was in 2006.
“Brady will be dearly missed,” said Tokaji. “There was really no one like him. He was a gentle and kind person. It is clear he had a drive to improve the lives of others that guided him in everything he did personally and professionally. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren commented, ‘Brady understood that even if we changed only one person’s life, the fight would be worth it.’”
Submitted by Law School News on March 25, 2025
This article appears in the categories: Faculty, Features
Related employee profiles: Lisa Washington, Emily Buchholz
