Since 1967, UNC School of Law’s graduating class has selected a member of the faculty to receive the Frederick B. McCall Award for Teaching Excellence in recognition for outstanding teaching. The award is named for Frederick B. McCall, who served on the Carolina Law faculty for more than 40 years. He was an outstanding scholar of property and estates law, a tireless contributor to the North Carolina General Statutes Commission, and a celebrated teacher. Upon his retirement in 1967, students established the McCall Award, typically given at commencement.
This year’s recipient of the McCall Award is Professor Osamudia James. James joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2021, and her writing and teaching interests include education law, race and the law, administrative law, and torts. She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and popular press commentary exploring the interaction of law and identity in the context of public education. Her work has appeared in the NYU Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others, as well as in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.
James graduated with honors from the Georgetown University Law Center and earned an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin, where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow. She practiced law at King & Spalding in Washington, D.C. before joining the faculty at the University of Miami, where she taught for 13 years prior to joining Carolina Law. In 2014, James was a co-recipient of the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award, a national award presented to a junior faculty member who makes an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice through activism, mentoring, teaching, and scholarship. She was also awarded the Hausler Golden Apple Teaching Award from Miami Law in 2017 and was selected as a University of Miami Public Voices Fellow in 2020.
In her acceptance speech for the McCall Award, James emphasized the impact that the Class of 2024 had on her as an educator. “I have drawn inspiration from you. I have taken courage from you. And if I was able to be a source of inspiration for you just once, if I was able to give you some knowledge that informed your intellectual analysis of the world as you see it, then I might be able to say that I embody the spirit of this award,” she said, her words underscoring the reciprocal nature of the teacher-student relationship and the lasting impact that educators can have on their students’ lives and careers.
Annalise Graves ’24, secretary of the Student Bar Association, presented the award to James, noting that, “those who had her as a professor know that she is engaging, supportive, and unbelievably insightful.” Graves also highlighted James’s contributions as a guest lecturer in the Black Lives Matter in the Law course and as an outstanding panelist on the Students for Fair Admissions panel. “Perhaps you’ve even read her article that was cited by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a Supreme Court dissent last fall,” Graves added, emphasizing the impact of James’s scholarship.
“Professor James pushes this community to be better for all students, no matter who they are or where they come from,” Graves concluded. “She makes us better scholars, better attorneys, better advocates, and better people. Carolina Law is so lucky to have her.”
