Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Biography

Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is the David Dinkins '56 Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for
Criminal Justice. She teaches and writes in criminal law and procedure, evidence, and abolition.
A nationally recognized expert in indigent defense, Hoag-Fordjour regularly conducts trainings
for federal and state defender organizations, and provides on-air analysis for CNN, Al-Jazeera,
NPR, and other media outlets. Her scholarship interrogates the role of race, racism, and power
throughout the criminal adjudication system, and appears in the New York University Law
Review, Michigan Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Fordham Law Review, among
others. Brooklyn law students have twice voted Hoag-Fordjour Faculty Member of the Year. In
2021, she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

Prior to academia, Hoag-Fordjour spent more than a decade as a civil rights and criminal defense
lawyer, primarily representing death-sentenced 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, Tenn. She chairs the Death Penalty Information Center board and
serves as a board member of the Abolitionist Law Center, the Constitutional Accountability
Center, and the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, while also serving on Vera Institute of
Justice’s Reform Leadership Council. She is a graduate of Yale University and NYU Law, where
she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar. She clerked for the late Judge John T. Nixon of the
United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.