Tonya L. Brito is the Jefferson Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin Law School and a member of the Executive Board of UW’s Institute for Research on Poverty. Her research interests include family law and policy, law and inequality, socio-legal studies, critical race empiricism, and qualitative research methods. Professor Brito’s scholarship critically examines the intersection of family law and poverty law. Professor Brito’s recent publications include Focused Ethnography: A Methodological Approach for Engaged Legal Research(in press); “I Do for My Kids”: Negotiating Race and Racial Inequality in Family Court, awarded LSA’s John Hope Franklin Prize Honorable Mention; and Chronicle of a Debt Foretold: Zablocki v. Red Hail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978), an oral history research study of a Supreme Court decision involving a successful challenge to Wisconsin’s “permission to marry” statute.

Professor Brito is the lead PI of an interdisciplinary qualitative study analyzing the civil justice experiences of low-income fathers who owe unpaid child support and cannot afford attorney representation within the family court system. Drawing from five years of fieldwork, Professor Brito is using ethnographic observations of child support enforcement hearings, court records, hearing transcripts, and interviews with judges, government lawyers, defense counsel and litigants to examine how pro se litigants navigate the court process and how attorney representation makes a difference to case outcomes. Professor Brito’s study has been supported by several research grants and fellowships, including two awards from the NSF’s Law and Social Science Program and a 2018-2019 Visiting Scholar position at the Russell Sage Foundation.

The Law and Society Association has been Professor Brito’s intellectual home since joining the academy. In addition to regularly organizing session panels and roundtables for the Annual Meeting, she participated in LSA’s 1998 Summer Institute, served on the Graduate Student Workshop Committee (2002-2003), was a member of the Annual Meeting Program Committee (2003-2004); a member of the Membership Committee (2004-2005), a member of the faculty hosting the 2005 LSA Summer Institute at Oxford, a member of the Law and Society Review Editorial Board (2003-2006), a member of the Dissertation Prize Committee (2008-2009), a member of the Kalven Prize Committee (2010-2011), the chair of the John Hope Franklin Prize Committee (2011-2012) and has been an active member of CRN 12, Critical Research on Race and the Law.

At UW Law School, Professor Brito previously served as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development (2014-2016) and the Director of the Institute for Legal Studies (2013-2016). As ILS Director, she hosted numerous conferences, speaker series, and other academic programs, including the 2014 Midwest Law & Society Retreat, the Legal Studies Workshop Series, and the Law and Society Speaker Series. She also developed and inaugurated the Law & Society Graduate Fellows Program at UW Law. 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. She has been a visiting professor at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Giessen, Germany (2013), Doshisha Law School, in Kyoto, Japan (2012) and University of Maryland Law School (2004).