Elizabeth A. Wilson

Elizabeth A. Wilson is Counsel focusing on employment litigation in the private sector. Ms. Wilson holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in English and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior to joining Gilbert Employment Law, Ms. Wilson was an Associate in the Litigation department of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she was an integral part of the team that brought habeas corpus claims on behalf of war on terrorism detainees held in Guantanamo Bay culminating in the landmark Supreme Court case Boumediene v. Bush. She was also an Associate at Baach Robinson & Lewis (now Lewis Baach) where she represented released British Guantanamo detainees in claims for damages against the U.S. government (Rasul v. Myers) and brought the first habeas petitions on behalf of detainees in Bagram Air Force Base. She was the main drafter of a report on torture in Guantanamo Bay, published by the Center for Constitutional Rights. At WilmerHale and Lewis Baach, she also worked on corporate investigations and international litigation.  During law school, she interned at the Public Corruption Unit of the Criminal Division of the US Attorney’s office in Boston and at Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo as a litigation associate.

Ms. Wilson then became assistant professor of international human rights law in the School of Diplomacy, Seton Hall University, where she focused on civil and political rights, including discrimination based on sex, race, and age.

Ms. Wilson has written extensively about the right to associate in the context of strikes and protest movements.  She has been visiting professor at Columbia University’s Institute for Human Rights; Rutgers Law School, Newark, New Jersey; and the George Washington University Law School, Washington, DC.  She has also taught as assistant professor in the Department of English, Yale University.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, during which she taught at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and a Nehru-Fulbright Senior Scholarship, during which she did research on Gandhi’s legacy for the human rights movement at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India. She has also received a German Academic Exchange Award (DAAD), during which she taught at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. She has also been a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Contemporary Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. She is the recipient of a grants from the ARCA Foundation and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict for her work on nonviolent movements.

She is the author of People Power and International Human Rights: Creating a Legal Framework and numerous works on nonviolent resistance movements, human rights, and constitutional torts.