Alexis J. Hoag-Fordjour

Adjunct Professor of Law
Assistant Professor of Law and Co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice, Brooklyn Law School

Alexis Hoag-Fordjour teaches and writes in criminal law and procedure, evidence and abolition, and co-directs the Center for Criminal Justice at Brooklyn Law School. Her scholarship interrogates the policies, doctrines and practices within the criminal legal system that erode people’s constitutional rights and perpetuate racial subordination. Professor Hoag-Fordjour's writing has appeared in the New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Harvard Law Review Blog, and other journals. She serves on the boards of the Death Penalty Information Center and the Eighth Amendment Project, and on the editorial board of the Amicus Journal, and co-chairs the Capital Punishment Committee of the New York City Bar Association. A legal contributor for CBSNews, Hoag-Fordjour frequently provides on-air and in-print analysis for MSNBC, NPR, CNN and other media outlets. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Prior to joining the Brooklyn Law faculty, Hoag-Fordjour served as the inaugural practitioner-in-residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and 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. She graduated from Yale University and NYU School of Law, where she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar. After law school, she was a law clerk for the late Judge John T. Nixon of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.