Vera Institute of Justice

James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, DC. In 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou School, an alternative school for youth who had left education or been arrested. In the decades since, it has expanded to run multiple schools inside DC’s youth and adult prisons.

Forman’s scholarship focuses on the race and class dimensions of schools, police, and prisons. His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017 and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, was published in 2024 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

At Yale Law, Forman initiated the Access to Law School Program in 2020, a novel student-run pipeline program helping people from underrepresented groups gain admission to law school and prepare for careers as lawyers. In January 2022, he helped launch the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center.

Forman is a trustee of the Council on Criminal Justice and a member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.