By: Ali Teske//May 25, 2022//
Bernadette Atuahene, property law scholar, has been named by the University of Wisconsin Law School as inaugural James E. Jones Chair. The announcement came Tuesday.
The position honors the law school’s first African American faculty member, James E. Jones Jr., a civil rights activist, scholar and professor. Jones founded in 1973 the William H. Hastie Teaching Fellowship as an LL.M. degree program to prepare lawyers from underrepresented groups for tenur track positions. According to the law school the James E. Jones Chair is UW-Madison’s first fully funded chair named for an African American faculty member.
Atuahene is a law school professor with previous experience teaching at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and as a research professor for the American Bar Foundation. Her areas of expertise focus on property, trusts and estates, property and race, law and international development and international business transactions.
After growing up in Los Angeles, Atuahene received her B.A. from University of California Los Angeles, her J.D. from Yale Law School and her MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She has received the Fullbright Fellowship, Council on Foreign Relation’s International Affairs Fellowship, Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs Fellowship and the National Science Foundation award for her project. A notable author, Atuahene has published in Southern California Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, California Law Review, New York University Law Review, The New York Times, L.A. Times, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.
Based in Madison, Atuahene will begin teaching this fall, but will continue to conduct her research about racialized property tax administration in Detroit for part of the year.