Bela August Walker is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School (Newark), where he teaches Property and Family Law. He has previously taught at the Fordham University School of Law, the Roger Williams University School of Law, the City University of New York School of Law and the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. His scholarly interest is in the study of law and identity, with a focus on race and racism. His research draws on diverse areas of public and private law, including critical race theory, gender theory, law and sexuality, family law and property law.
Walker earned his A.B. cum laude from Bryn Mawr College and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and served as the Essay & Review Editor of the Columbia Law Review. Subsequently, he clerked for the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for the Honorable Robert P. Patterson of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He also worked as a Staff Attorney at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and Director of Political and Legal Advocacy for Dailey & Walker Strategies.
Walker’s publications include: Locating the Criminal: Civil Sanctions, Sexual Abuse & the American Family, demonstrating how civil sanctions on sex offenders focus on the red herring of stranger offenders without generating the systemic change necessary to curb child sexual abuse (Southwest Law Review); Reexamining Privilege Revealed Twenty Years Later: Privilege as Property, revisiting two groundbreaking texts to explore the continued impact of discrimination and discriminatory privilege in the legal world (Washington University Journal of Law and Policy); Fractured Bonds: Policing Whiteness & Womanhood through Race-Based Marriage Annulments, applying a century of race-based annulment cases to demonstrate how the courts employed images of white womanhood to protect the stability of whiteness and white society (DePaul Law Review); and The Color of Crime: The Case Against Race Based Suspect Descriptions, revealing how the use of use of race identifiers in criminal suspect descriptions create discriminatory and ineffective law enforcement (Columbia Law Review).
Walker has been a member of the State Bar of New York since 2006 and is admitted to the Eastern District of New York.