Patricia J. Williams

Patricia J. Williams was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A longtime former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation, Williams is also the author of six books of nonfiction. In her most recent work, The Miracle of the Black Leg (2024), Williams leverages her background as a contracts law scholar and her journalist’s sense of curiosity to explore themes of identity, ethics, and race. This genre-exploding tour de force begins with the author’s meditation on a mysterious, centuries-old painting depicting a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached—the Black “donor” collapsed in the foreground. “My imagination spun cocoons of explanation, like lullabies” the author writes. “[...] Ultimately, I had to step outside of my own assumptions, expectations, and fictionalizing to finally ask—thus opening myself to the documentation of the painting’s history.” To engage with Williams’s oeuvre is to step outside of the creative/academic binary and encounter pages where creative musings reverberate alongside groundbreaking investigations into archiving as a social process. In the words of the activist and philosopher Angela Davis, Williams’s work contains “stunning analyses of seemingly ordinary stories and the surprising connections between them.” A MacArthur fellow (2000), Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University.