Background

Madalyn K. Wasilczuk is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. Her work focuses on criminal legal system issues, including policing, race, extreme sentencing, conditions of confinement, and the prosecution and detention of children and pregnant people. She directs the Youth Defender Clinic and teaches 8th Amendment Law & Litigation, Criminal Adjudication, and a Juvenile Justice Seminar.

Professor Wasilczuk’s scholarship appears in publications such as the Georgetown Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Buffalo Law Review, and has been featured by numerous local and national news outlets. Her database on deaths in custody in South Carolina represents the only publicly available dataset of deaths in the state’s lockups, juvenile detention centers, jails, and prisons since 2015. She is also the co-Principal Investigator on a national study of pregnancy criminalization in the three years following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center

Before joining the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law faculty, Professor Wasilczuk taught at Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center, where she directed the Juvenile Defense Clinic and taught courses on capital punishment and carceral abolition. Prior to that, she worked at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, where she taught in the International Human Rights Clinic and Capital Punishment Clinic, and at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, where she was an Assistant Defender. She has also served as a fellow with the International Legal Foundation in Myanmar and Tunisia, where she mentored and trained local public defenders.

Professor Wasilczuk holds a B.A. in International Studies with Honors, summa cum laude, from American University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she earned the Leonard J. Schreier Memorial Prize in Ethics. She is licensed to practice law in Louisiana, the U.S. Court for Middle District of Louisiana, the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina (limited to clinical practice).

Selected Scholarship

• Killing Stays, 2024 Wis. L. Rev. 3 (2024). 
• The Racialized Violence of Police Canine Force, 111 Geo. L.J. 5 (2023). 
• The Clinic as a Site of Grounded Pedagogy, 29 Clin. L. Rev. 405 (2023). 
• For Their Own Good: Girls, Sexuality, and State Violence in the Name of Safety, 59 Cal. W. L. Rev. 1 (2023). 
• Developing Police, 70 Buff. L. Rev. 271 (2022).

Education

• J.D. New York University
• B.A. American University

Teaching

• Criminal Adjudication (LAWS 613)
• Eighth Amendment Law & Litigation (LAWS 758)
• Youth Defender Clinic (LAWS 772)
• Juvenile Justice Seminar (LAWS 797)