Patricia Williams, university distinguished professor of law and humanities and member of the WGSS Executive Committee, joins 252 other academics across various disciplines at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an honorary society and research center that aims to collaboratively solve complex problems across disciplines. The induction ceremony is scheduled to take place on October 10th in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“On the personal level, it’s been both a long trajectory but an extraordinarily rewarding one, even in this moment of precarity for everything that a legal education stands for.”
In addition to teaching in Northeastern’s School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities philosophy and religion departments, and pioneering the American legal academic field, a trailblazer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, Williams is also the director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives in the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and a regular contributer to publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Nation. For decades, she has integrated research across a variety of fields to address law focused on race, property, surrogacy, civil rights, climate change, as well as the broader legacy of slavery, biotech in healthcare, and the threat AI algorithms pose to both legal rights and human identity. Although she certainly cannot be confined to only one area of expertise, Williams told Northeastern Global News, “I’ve really written about contracts; what I think and talk about are the limits of contracts.” In particular, she studies how contracts “intersect with the health and welfare of bodies.”
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