T. Anansi Wilson, J.D., Ph.D.

Founding Director, Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law
Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Saint Paul, Minnesota

Dr. T. Anansi Wilson is an award-winning scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, a racial-justice strategist, and an author of creative nonfiction. Their legal research is situated in legal philosophy, critical theory, political economy, and constitutional law. Their writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political, and legal realities of domination in the West. They seek to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained. Wilson’s work analyzes the ever changing relationships between race, law, sexuality, power, and citizenship; both in the construction of law and policy and the maintenance of the way we live our lives. They are particularly concerned with Fourth, 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment questions. Their teaching interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, federal criminal civil rights, Fourth, 13th and 14th amendment law, Reconstruction, political and civil rights, critical race studies, LGBTQ issues, and all areas pertaining to race, law, and society.

Anansi Wilson employs Critical Race, Black Feminist, Performance and Women & Gender Studies and legal methodologies to examine how instances and (extra) legal precedents of anti-Black violence and racial-sexual terror continue to frame and impact notions of Black being and citizenship. Professor Wilson employs a multidisciplinary gaze to engage the creative, the legal, and the literary to uncover an emerging approach to encountering, understanding, and extrapolating anti-Blackness as a jurisprudential logic, underpinning, and precedent embedded in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and decisions they inform.