While attending law school, Walker-Peddakotla worked as a community organizer and served as a trustee on the village board in west suburban Oak Park. Her experiences in both roles helped convince her that the nation’s system of policing and incarceration was so ineffective and so oppressive that it had to be completely dismantled.

Here are four more things to know about Walker-Peddakotla.

Her U.S. Army service taught her the human costs of war.

Walker-Peddakotla was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of immigrants from India. A survivor of child abuse and domestic violence, Walker-Peddakotla joined the U.S. Army and served for six years. As a histotechnologist deployed to Dover Air Force Base, she assisted on autopsies of service members killed in the U.S.’s post-9/11 wars. Her time in the army was a lesson, she says, “in the human costs of service that the public doesn’t see. It changed how I thought about U.S. militarism and imperialism.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology, she completed a master’s degree in microbiology and immunology at Loyola and then worked in information technology before contemplating law school.

She’s an uncompromising activist.

In 2019, Walker-Peddakotla, a mother of three, cofounded the community group Freedom to Thrive Oak Park, which conducts and publicizes research on policing in order to reimagine community safety. That same year, she secured a seat on the Oak Park Village Board, becoming, she says, “the only abolitionist.” Fellow trustees urged her to compromise on policing, while local activists pressed her to hold firm on the abolitionist platform they shared. Walker-Peddakotla says she received death threats in response to her calls to defund the police. The stress of the job and a major surgery took a severe toll on her health, leading her to resign in 2022, just months short of finishing her four-year term.

“I never gave in to the immense pressure to compromise, and…I stayed true to my beliefs as an abolitionist,” she wrote in her resignation statement. Among her accomplishments, Walker-Peddakotla helped organize to cancel the village’s agreement with Oak Park and River Forest High School to maintain a uniformed police presence in the school. (That decision has since been rolled back, with a new policing agreement between the village and the school put in place after Walker-Peddakotla’s resignation.)

She cocreated a course examining the need to abolish systems of oppression.

As a part-time law student, Walker-Peddakotla worked with Aisha Cornelius Edwards (JD ’05), executive director of Cabrini Green Legal Aid and School of Law adjunct professor, to create a new course, Abolition and Movement Lawyering. Launched in spring 2022, the course aligns with the School of Law’s renewed mission to dismantle racism and systems of oppression. “Law students are rarely taught to consider how the law creates and protects systems of oppression,” Walker-Peddakotla says. “The feedback we received from students was amazing.”

She’s a sought-after scholar.

Walker-Peddakotla describes herself as a “scholar-activist with one foot in the academy and one foot in community organizing.” In 2022, the Open Society Foundations awarded her a prestigious Soros Justice Fellowship to create tools to help defund police and reinvest funds back into the community. In addition, Walker-Peddakotla’s law school paper “The Potential Role of Data in the Goal of Abolishing the Carceral System,” authored under the mentorship of Professor Dean Strang and selected for a 2023–24 Loyola Rule of Law Institute Research Award, analyzes how crime statistics are used to justify investment in policing and incarceration and considers how data instead could help communities create “alternatives to the carceral system rooted in safety and care.”

In March, Walker-Peddakotla was selected as the 2024 William H. Hastie Fellow by the University of Wisconsin Law School. The fellowship is a two-year program supporting aspiring legal scholars and preparing them for careers in the legal academy. Walker-Peddakotla says the fellowship will give her more time to devote to legal research and publication. But even with one foot in the legal academy, she says she’ll keep the other rooted firmly in abolitionist community organizing. –Andrew Santella (July 2024)