A Tribute to Stephanie Phillips

Stephanie Phillips was a dedicated member of our law school faculty for over 30 years, retiring in 2022. Throughout her distinguished career, she focused her research and teaching on Conflict of Laws, Securities Regulation, African American Legal History, Law and Religion, and Mindfulness and the Law. Stephanie's approach to teaching was innovative—she was among the first to integrate mindfulness meditation into her courses, recognizing its benefits for the mental and emotional wellbeing of law students and future attorneys. Beyond her teaching, Stephanie was a pioneer in Critical Race Theory, co-organizing the first Critical Race Theory Workshop in 1989. She continued to contribute to this field throughout her career, exploring the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Her work left an indelible mark on legal scholarship and on all of us who had the privilege of learning from her.

I believe I may be one of the few people, if not the only person, to have had the unique honor of being both a colleague and a formal student of Stephanie’s. In preparation for her retirement, Stephanie asked me to continue offering her mindfulness and law course—a responsibility I did not take lightly, given how central it was to her legacy. I audited her class for a semester, and it was a transformative experience. Stephanie was an incredibly gifted teacher. She had an extraordinary ability to blend mindfulness and spirituality with the law, creating a learning environment that was both profound and deeply human.

Reflecting on Stephanie, I’m reminded of a quote from the philosopher and spiritual teacher Alan Watts:

'What I would call a really swinging human being is a person who lives on two levels at once. [They] [are] able to live on the level of being [their] ordinary ego, [their] everyday personality, and play [their] role in life, and to observe all the rules that go with that. But if [they] [are] only on that level, if [they] [are] only playing that kind of thing and think that’s all there is, it becomes a drag... But if you can maintain, at the same time, the sense of being this specific [person] with [your] role in life….and know also that, underneath this, we are the whole works, you get a very marvelous and agreeable arrangement.'

Stephanie embodied this duality beautifully. She understood that she was Stephanie Phillips and, at the same time, so much more. This understanding is what led her to become a reverend and a mindfulness teacher—it’s what allowed her to connect with something beyond herself while remaining fully grounded in who she was. As a teacher, a friend, and a colleague, she was as beautifully human as one could ever be. Yet, she always carried with her a light, a knowledge, and an understanding that there is something deeper and more profound beyond our everyday existence. When you interacted with Stephanie, you sensed that she was intimately acquainted with both the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. She was, as Alan Watts would say, a truly swinging human. Stephanie embodied this understanding every day, and I know that her spirit will continue to inspire us all to do the same.