THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Lucy A. Williams
“I believed in fighting racism and inequality from my very earliest days.”
Attorney, Educator, Author, Activist. Expert in the areas of unemployment insurance, Social Security and related welfare programs. First openly LGBTQ faculty member, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. Co-director of Northeastern’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and convener of the International Social and Economic Rights Project, a group of international academics, judges and activists working to encourage transformative thinking about social and economic rights and SER-based legal strategies, Boston, MA. Baylor University, BA 1969. University of Chicago, JD 1974.
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, June 2023
Photo 1. Professor Lucy A. Williams teaches a Law School class, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. 1983. Photo 2. Professor Lucy Williams in the Law Library at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. 1994 (Photo by Craig Bailey).
More About Lucy:
- Lucy A. Williams biography, Northeastern University
- Recognition of a Human Rights Scholar and Activist, November 2019
- Select Publications
- Lucy A. Williams, Race, Rat Bites and Unfit Mothers: How Media Discourse Informs Welfare Legislation Debate, 22 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1159 (2011).
- Lucy A. Williams, Cross-Border Reflections on Poverty: Lessons From the United States and Mexico, 5 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 33 (2000).
- Decades of Distortion: The Right’s 30-year Assault on Welfare by Lucy A. Williams December, 1997
- Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration website
- The Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy website