Patricia Wilson

Associate Dean and Professor of Law

Patricia A. Wilson was named associate dean of Baylor Law in 2021 and has been a member of the Baylor Law faculty since 1993. During that time, she has taught courses on Employment Discrimination, Employment Relations, Labor Law, Family Law, and Property. She taught the first year Property course for 12 years, and she has also taught courses on Antitrust, Intellectual Property, Consumer Protection, and Legal Writing. Dean Wilson also serves as a Minority Law Student Advisor. She is currently taking a hiatus from serving as the Faculty Advisor to Baylor Law's Client Counseling Team given her duties as a member of the ABA Law Student Division Competitions Committee, which include writing the problems used in the Regional and National Client Counseling Competitions.

In the classroom, students benefit both from Dean Wilson's professional and personal experience, where she supplements textbook cases with real-life examples. Before joining the Baylor Law Faculty, she practiced law for seven years, including four years with American Airlines, Inc. There, she managed litigation matters worth millions of dollars, negotiated and drafted contracts for topics as diverse as software licensing and health care plan administration, and handled matters involving airline regulation and employment discrimination.

Family Law is of particular importance to Dean Wilson. In addition to raising two children of their own, she and her husband, Michael Jones, have fostered more than twenty children over the past two decades and adopted two children in the process. This immersion in the foster care system has given Wilson has a clearer understanding than most of the complexities of family law. Easy black-and-white answers give way to multiple shades of grey when it comes to dealing with families and children. It is Dean Wilson's goal to train her students to become fair, ethical advocates in the face of such complicated, life-altering issues.

Dean Wilson speaks regularly at continuing legal education seminars in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago on such topics as legal ethics and complex real estate negotiations. She has presented and led discussions at the Oxford Round Tables at Oxford University on gender issues in the tenure process. She is a former member of the State Bar of Texas Consumer and Commercial Law Council, and served as the Council secretary from August 2006 to July 2008. She is currently contributing editor for the Family Law section of the General Practice Digest of the State Bar of Texas. Wilson is a trained mediator and she is actively involved in the Waco community serving on the boards of a number of local nonprofit organizations.

Dean Wilson earned her undergraduate degree from Purdue University (B.A., 1982, Sociology), graduating With Distinction. She received her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law (J.D., 1985), where she was named a Wigmore Scholar and was a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Law and Business.