Nigeria’s 23-year-old Tomi Williams has been elected the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. This followed last year’s (2017) election of Imelme Umana, another Nigerian, as the first black female president of the world-renowned Harvard Law Review.
Incidentally, it is the first time ever that four of the top Law Schools in the US have black editors-in-chief – Djenab Conde (Berkeley’s California Law Review), Michael Thomas (Harvard Law Review), and Megan Brown at the Michigan Law Review.
As editor-in-chief, Tomi says he plans to diversify the journal’s content, contributors and online presence, among other things.
He told the official Columbia University website: “We have to have more original online presence; the Law Review has to catch up with the rest of the media. Maybe we won’t have any of these things this year, but we are trying to make a digital plan for the next five years,” he says.
One of his goals is to also expand the editorial purview of the journal.
“We need to make sure that the scholarship and the voices that we’re pulling in are diverse in terms of ideology and topics, in terms of where our contributors are in their professional lives, whether they are a fellow, or assistant professor, of full professor.
“We’re looking at how to make sure we’re bringing in enough diverse individuals in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic status, disabilities, religious backgrounds, and ideologies of all types.”
Tomi has been described as an “epitome of dedicated and humble leadership” who “has an unparalleled work ethic” and is “unafraid to dream big.”
“Watching him in action since he became the editor-in-chief (in February) has been an enormous privilege. He inspires me and I learn from him every day,” his immediate predecessor in office, Kelsey Austin Ruescher, says of him.
Tomi Williams was born in England to Nigerian parents who moved their family to the United States when Tomi was only three years old.
His father, a medical doctor, and his mother, a nurse, wanted their son to follow in their footsteps (medical profession), but Tomi and his elder brother chose the path once trodden by their paternal grandparents who attended law school in England and moved back to Nigeria.
As high school student in Maryland, Tomi was said to have founded a non-profit organization called ‘Hands on Works’ to offer internships to underserved Baltimore students to introduce them to professional career paths.
He hit limelight then when the Baltimore Sun published a feature story about him after he was elected by his peers to represent them as the student member of the Howard County Board of Education.
When Timi arrived at the Columbia Law School in 2016, his intention was to pursue to a career as a prosecutor; so he was enrolled in the ‘Challenging the Consequences of Mass Incarceration Clinic’.
“I wanted to make sure before I entered that type of work that I understood the seriousness of putting someone behind bars,” he says.
And it would appear that all his life he had been prepped for and attuned to leadership position. As an undergraduate at the Amherst College, Tomi was twice elected president of the students’ body, chaired the institution’s judiciary council and served as the editor-in-chief of the Amherst College Law Review.
And “he was so well-known and well-liked that he was dubbed a ‘campus celebrity’,” the website says about him.
When asked why he once ran for the headship of his alma mater (Amherst), he said the main reason was “to change; change perceptions, and (hopefully) change the school.”
“There are people who don’t feel happy here (Amherst), who feel marginalized, lonely and even targeted and that’s not good. I suppose when you get a group of intelligent and competitive people together, the environment can be prone to becoming a bit adversarial.
“When this becomes a barrier to building proper community and sustaining a familiar bond amongst schoolmates, we are failing at a big part of what college is meant to be.”