Associate Professor Kara Sheli Wallis ’15 will spend the Fall 2025 semester as a visiting scholar at Seattle University School of Law, where she will be conducting research on white supremacy and the erosion of procedural legitimacy.
The project, Nothing About Us Without Us: Rule of Law, White Supremacy, and the Lack of Legitimacy in Our Federal Courts, draws from Wallis’s litigation experience challenging the use of solitary confinement in both youth and adult carceral systems in the State of Florida. As an attorney at Florida Justice Institute, part of the Florida Prison Litigation Partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center and Florida Legal Services, Wallis litigated Section 1983 constitutional and Americans with Disability Act (ADA) claims during a period marked by intensified authoritarian governance under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration.
At Seattle University, Wallis will be in conversation with law school and philosophy faculty working at the intersections of civil procedure, ethics, social movements, and democratic collapse. She hopes her experience from the failed litigation challenges in Florida will give insight into the troubled ideological foundations of the federal judiciary and rule of law for the United States government.
“Our Nation is undergoing a revolution that we have already seen play out in Florida,” Wallis said. “This project is about documenting that reality, and contributing to scholarship that begins from the premise that law must be accountable to the communities it governs.”
Wallis teaches courses in civil litigation, lawyering skills, and ethics at CUNY School of Law. Her recent and forthcoming publications explore the legal mechanics of surveillance, incarceration, and family separation, including an article on federally mandated reporting policy, its racial harm in healthcare settings, and the structural failures of family policing.
A graduate of Seattle University and CUNY Law, Wallis brings both a scholarly and lived commitment to public interest law. Her work advances legal scholarship rooted in practice, critical of entrenched systems, and responsive to demands of justice that center people.