“Knowing how to communicate is the foundation of so many careers, especially in law,” says Reakash Walters, Bachelor of Communication Studies ’15. The 2024 MacEwan Emerging Leader Award recipient was finishing up her Master’s of Law at Columbia Law School as a Fullbright Scholar and a Davis Polk Fellow – with high honours – when we caught up with her.
Today, Walters is working on a Doctor of Juridical Science at UC Berkeley School of Law.
While law – and her ultimate goal of becoming a law professor – wasn’t always her chosen career path, her communications degree has certainly helped smooth the way.
“One of the best tools I gained at MacEwan was the ability to communicate ideas in an accessible way,” says Walters. “A key piece of being a lawyer is being able to tell your client’s story.”
Making ideas accessible served her well when she was working with Senator Kim Pate on Appointed, a podcast that breaks down government policy to advance initiatives for people experiencing poverty and marginalization. And navigating a lengthy member strike as a communications officer with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) really opened her eyes to how the law fits into different sectors.
“It was 100-day campaign with members striking at all hours of the day, in minus 50 degree weather,” she says. “I was really impressed by the lawyers working with them, and it made me think about becoming a labour lawyer.”
That thought led her to the University of Ottawa, where she graduated cum laude and began practicing law in Ontario, making her way up to clerk for Justice Sheilah Martin at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Walters’s career has had incredible momentum, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. The first year of law school was challenging, and there were moments when she considered giving up. “I was lucky to have supportive professors at the University of Ottawa who believed in my ability to excel and pushed me to keep going.”
And research kept Walters coming back to academia – including her research on the role Black women in Nova Scotia played in the civil rights movement in Canada, which she published in 2019, and the role of racism in the criminal justice system, a topic Walters lectured on for Ontario Crown Attorneys during their summer educational series.
“I'm excited about engaging in research that offers insight into how we might build systems of justice that are substantively just for all communities,” she says.
“All communities, but with special attention to those that are marginalized and racialized,” she adds – citing the significant over-representation of Black and Indigenous people in the criminal legal system.
To that end, Walters is examining the constitutive power of race in the criminal justice system and the criminalization of Black friendship and kinship through the Criminal Code as the topic of her doctoral research – work that led to her current role as a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration.
“Creating solutions for present day justice issues and thinking through how we can design legal systems that are helpful rather than harmful for our communities requires courageous inquiry into the material effects of existing justice processes.”
As she completes her studies, Walters has already taken steps towards another goal: being the educator she never had in Canada.
“I didn’t have any Black educators until my master’s at Columbia,” she says. “That lack of diverse educational experience sets us up to hold a set of biases about who holds knowledge and who we should seek out knowledge from.”
Earlier this year, Reakash taught a Critical Race Theory course at her alma mater, the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. “I loved co-creating a learning space with my students,” she says. “They were brilliant and engaged. They even started their own critical race book club after the class ended!”
With just 15 Black, female law professors in Canada, it’s not a goal she takes lightly. Although Walters acknowledges the magnitude of her work, she is humbled that others have noticed.
“I think that a lot of us are doing our best in our little corner of the world – we have our heads down and are working to make our visions reality,” she says. “So, when someone taps you on the shoulder with an award like this Emerging Leader award from MacEwan, it feels like an affirmation that I'm doing what I should be doing.”