The Constitutional Accountability Center is pleased to announce that it has selected Professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour of Brooklyn Law School as its inaugural Scholar-in-Residence. Beginning on July 1, 2024, Hoag-Fordjour will work independently for one year on scholarship surfacing the historical context of Reconstruction to provide a clarifying framework for interpreting rights in the present. She will also participate in the life of CAC’s ongoing work in litigation, communications, and collaboration with progressive movement partners.

At Brooklyn Law, Professor Hoag-Fordjour serves as a Dean’s Research Scholar, Co-Director of the Center for Criminal Justice, and teaches Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and Abolition. Her scholarship focuses on interrogating criminal constitutional law and reimagining doctrine that could produce more just, equitable, and inclusive outcomes for defendants. Hoag-Fordjour’s writing has appeared in the New York University Law Review (twice), Michigan Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and other journals. She regularly provides legal commentary on pressing criminal justice and civil rights issues, appearing on-air for CNN, NPR, and Al-Jazeera, and in-print for Inquest and SCOTUSblog.

Prior to academia, Hoag-Fordjour spent over a decade as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and the Office of the Federal Public Defender. She began her legal career clerking for the late Honorable John T. Nixon of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Hoag-Fordjour is a graduate of Yale College and NYU School of Law, where she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar.

In 2021, Professor Hoag-Fordjour helped CAC mark the ten-year anniversary and re-release of Laying Claim to the Constitution: The Promise of New Textualism. With an original essay and spoken commentary, Hoag-Fordjour reflected on using the Constitution’s history as a tool for liberation and equality. CAC is thrilled to work collaboratively with Professor Hoag-Fordjour!

CAC’s scholar-in-residence program is made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.