Vera Institute of Justice

Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is a professor at Brooklyn Law School where she teaches and writes on criminal law and procedure, evidence, and abolition, and co-directs the Center for Criminal Justice. Her writing has appeared in the New York University Law Review (twice), Michigan Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Fordham Law Review, U.C. Davis Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other publications. The Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C. selected Hoag-Fordjour as its inaugural scholar-in-residence where she is spending the 2024-2025 school year exploring the progressive aims of the Constitution. Prior to Brooklyn Law, Hoag-Fordjour served as the inaugural practitioner-in-residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil & Political Rights at Columbia University and as a lecturer at Columbia Law School. She spent more than a decade as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, primarily representing capitally convicted clients in federal post-conviction proceedings with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee. A legal contributor for CNN, Hoag-Fordjour frequently provides on-air analysis for MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, NPR, CBS, and other media outlets. She serves on the boards of the Death Penalty Information Center and the Eighth Amendment Project. In 2021, Hoag-Fordjour was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. She graduated from Yale University and NYU School of Law, where she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar. She served as a law clerk for the late Judge John T. Nixon of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Hoag-Fordjour lives in New York City with her husband.