John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law

In the fall of 1964, my uncle John Robinson Wilkins joined the Berkeley Law School faculty. He was the first black professor in the school’s illustrious history and only the second in the entire UC Berkeley system. Tragically, my uncle’s time on the Berkeley faculty would be short. In 1970, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. After a courageous struggle—in which he re-taught himself how to speak and walk with the unwavering love and support of his indomitable wife, Constance, and his two young children, John and Mariah—my uncle died on December 12, 1976. He was just fifty-one years old.
Although his days on earth were few, his contributions to both the practice and theory of law were many. He pioneered the nascent field of law and development and, along the way, shattered countless assumptions about the limits of race, legal careers, and ultimately the law itself. Unfortunately, outside of my family and a handful of my uncle’s remaining colleagues on the Berkeley faculty, few scholars or practitioners are aware of my uncle’s work. This is a loss not only for those of us who loved my uncle, but for the field of law he loved so dearly. For, as I attempt to document below, my uncle’s approach to mobilizing the full “resources of the law” to tackle “hard” problems of development remains as relevant today as it was when he put forward those ideas half a century ago.

David B. Wilkins, John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law: Testing the Limits of Race, Law and Development, and the American Legal Profession, 108 Calif. L. Rev. 1075 (2020).