Tonya Brito

George H. Young Chair Professor of Law

Contact

tlbrito@wisc.edu
608/265-6475
975 Bascom Mall, 8107 Law Building, Madison, WI, USA, 53706-1399

Education

A.B., Barnard College, Columbia U. (Political Science)
J.D., Harvard University Law School

Biography

Tonya L. Brito is the Jefferson Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin. She served as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development from 2014-2016 and as Director of the Institute for Legal Studies from 2013-2016. During her time as ILS Director, she organized and hosted numerous academic conferences and speaker series, developed and inaugurated the ILS Law and Society Graduate Fellows Program, and launched the Wednesday Workshop series, an internal works-in-progress series for law faculty.

Her research interests include access to civil justice, family law and policy, law and inequality, socio-legal studies, and qualitative research methods. An award winning scholar, Professor Brito's scholarship critically examines the role of the civil justice system in exacerbating social inequality and the intersection of family law and poverty law. Professor Brito is a national expert in the area of child support law and policy and has published widely in the area. Additionally, she is the principal investigator of a multi-year, multidisciplinary empirical study examining the experiences of low-income civil litigants in family court. Her research is supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Program, and numerous other funders. In 2016, the Law and Society Association awarded Professor Brito the John Hope Franklin Prize Honorable Mention, which is given for the best scholarly article on Race, Racism and the Law published within the prior two years. She is a recipient of both the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 2012 Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award and the University of Wisconsin System’s 2012 Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award.

Prior to joining the UW faculty, Professor Brito was a judicial law clerk for Judge John Garrett Penn of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, practiced complex civil litigation with the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., and served on the law faculty at Arizona State University College of Law. Professor Brito received her A.B with honors from Barnard College and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Scholarship & Publications

SSRN

Law Repository

Research Interests

Access to Civil Justice
Family Law and Policy
Poverty Law
Critical Race Empiricism
Law and Society
Qualitative Research Methods

Activities

Tonya Brito published "Litigating Precarity: Low-Wage Workers and Child Support Enforcement" in the North Carolina Law Review in 2023. The paper is co-authored with former student and Law School grad, Kathleen Wood. Read the paper.
Tonya Brito's paper, "Nonmarital Fathers in Family Court: Judges' and Lawyers' Perspectives," was accepted for publication by the Washington University Law Review. The paper will be published in August 2022 in Volume 99 of the law review.
Tonya Brito presented on "Breastfeeding, Race and Mutual Aid" at the Spring 2021 California Western Law Review. Read the article.
Wednesday, Mar 3, 2021Tonya Brito an invited panelist for the 2021 Policy Forum of the National Child Support Enforcement Association
National Child Support Enforcement Association
Tonya Brito presented "Academic Worker Inequalities and Flexibility Bias in the COVID-19 Era" at the Symposium on the COVID Care Crisis and its Implications for Legal Academia in January.
Tonya Brito presented "Race and Inequality in Family Court," as part of the Big 10 Law School series on race, law and equality. The 12-week series of lectures featured scholars from each of the Big 10 law schools.
Tonya Brito served as co-chair of the Family Law Committee for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project, "Civil Justice for All." The project findings were released in September 2020.
Tonya Brito’s article, “The Child Support Debt Bubble,” received praise on Jotwell, an online legal journal specializing in short reviews of recent scholarship. In “Private Debt and Public Violence,” Wendy Anne Bach called Brito’s article “exquisitely well done.”
Tonya Brito presented "A Civil Gideon Failure?" at Thinking About Law & Accessing Civil Justice, a February 2020 symposium sponsored by the UC Irvine Law Review.
Tonya Brito's book chapter, "Focused Ethnography: A Methodological Approach for Engaged Legal Research" (co-authored with Daanika Gordon and David J. Pate Jr.), appears in From the Ground Up: Legal Scholarship for the Urban Core.
Tonya Brito's essay, "The Right to Civil Justice," appears in a special Winter 2019 edition of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Brito's is one of 24 essays in the journal's Access to Justice issue, which examines the national crisis in civil legal services facing poor and low-income Americans.
Tonya Brito has been elected as a new member of the American Law Institute. The ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and otherwise improve the law.
Tonya Brito presented "Producing Justice in Poor People's Courts: Four Models of State Legal Actors" at the Fordham Law School Faculty Workshop Series in November.
Tonya Brito and Mitra Sharafi were elected to the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association. As members of the LSA Trustee Class of 2021, they will serve a three-year term on the board.