Tonya Brito

Professor Tonya Brito received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College, Columbia University in 1986. She received her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude, served as Executive Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and was a student attorney with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

Professor Brito’s scholarly interests are in the areas of family law, children’s issues, and poverty law. She has written on the relationship between family law and welfare law, child support, and the image of mothers in poverty discourse. More recently, she has worked with colleagues across campus as part of the Institute for Research on Poverty’s Child Support Demonstration Evaluation. Her work here has examined how the child support rules treat families where there is multiple partner fertility and how the child support rules treat situations of shared parenting.

At UW-Madison, she teaches courses in Civil Procedure, Family Law, and seminars she developed entitled Children, Law & Society, and Adoption Law & Policy. Professor Brito serves as an executive board member of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, serves on the executive board of the Center for Excellence in Family Studies at the UW, and is an affiliate of the UW Institute for Research on Poverty.

Prior to joining UW-Madison, Professor Brito clerked for Judge John Garrett Penn of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, practiced civil litigation for four years with the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., and served on the law faculty at Arizona State University College of Law.