The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Reakash Walters has been awarded an Edward E. Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2026.
Walters is a Canadian lawyer and doctoral candidate at Berkeley School of Law. Her research uses criminal law and evidence law to advance meso-level theories of race, examining the organizational mechanisms through which legal institutions reproduce systemic inequality.
Walters completed her Master of Laws at Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar with High Honors; she also completed her JD cum laude at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. Walters served as a law clerk to Justice Sheilah Martin at the Supreme Court of Canada and is called to the bar of Ontario, Canada. Before graduate school, Walters practiced as a criminal defence lawyer at a top criminal law firm in Toronto, Ontario. She has appeared before all levels of court, including before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Walters' Hildebrand Fellowship will support her travel to Ontario, where she will investigate how Canadian evidence law structures outcomes for racialized accused in criminal trials. She will complete a systematic content analysis of trial transcripts and reported decisions to examine how bad character evidence is tendered in criminal trials against racialized accused persons.
In addition to her Hildebrand Fellowship, Walters is currently the Stuart-Delisle Research Fellow at Queen’s University Faculty of Law, and a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration.