Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is the David Dinkins ’56 Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where she teaches and writes about criminal law and procedure, evidence, and abolition, and co-directs the Center for Criminal Justice. Hoag-Fordjour served as the inaugural scholar-in-residence at CAC. She serves on the boards of the Abolitionist Law Center, the Death Penalty Information Center, and is a member of the Eigthth Amendment Project advisory council and the Reform Leadership Council at Vera Institute of Justice. In 2021, Hoag-Fordjour was elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

Prior to academia, Hoag-Fordjour was 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 LDF and the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s a graduate of Yale College and NYU Law, and clerked for the late Judge John T. Nixon of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.