Brito uses law as weapon to fight poverty

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While attending Harvard Law School, Tonya Brito worked at a legal aid office and, there, came to feel a real connection with her clients.

“While I may have been helping them with a custody issue or something else, I often realized that many of the problems stemmed from poverty,” she said. “I may have been able to help them with the current problem, but I wasn’t able to address the bigger issue — poverty — which I knew would likely lead to more issues. The experience showed me the power of the law, as well as its limitations.”

Although Brito knew in law school she wanted to teach, she also wanted to gain courtroom experience. She served as a clerk for Judge John Garrett Penn at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and practiced civil and criminal litigation at a Washington, D.C., law firm.

“I knew from my own experiences with instructors that the ones who practiced law brought more to their classes, and I wanted to offer that,” said Brito, associate dean for research and faculty development and the Burris-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Beyond her teaching of family law and civil procedure, Brito dedicates a great deal of her time researching the places where family law and poverty law meet. She first noticed the connections when she was a student.

“I’ve been able to find a balance between teaching and research,” she said.

Brito and David Pate, a UW-Milwaukee social work professor, are the lead investigators in a project examining what happens in systems that various states use to offer legal assistance in civil-contempt proceedings. To that end, they’re taking a look at a program that provides attorneys for indigents in civil-contempt proceedings in Wisconsin and comparing their experiences to those of similar litigants in Illinois, where legal assistance is designed to help defendants represent themselves.

“I’m fascinated with how research can influence the law,” Brito said.

University of Wisconsin Law School Dean Margaret Raymond pointed out that Brito and Pate’s work is receiving support from two grants from the National Science Foundation. Often the competition for such money is intense.

“This current research dovetails with Professor Brito’s long commitment to community-service activities that address family law policy,” Raymond added.

Brito is finishing a three-year term working as the director of the Institute for Legal Studies, which offers programs, lectures, workshops and presentations on various topics.

“This is really geared towards our junior faculty and helping develop their scholarly profile,” she said.