The Pathbreaker

09/20/2024

Investiture Celebrates Alice Ristroph as Les Fagen Professor and Boundary-Pushing Scholar 

Professor Alice Ristroph, the inaugural Les Fagen Professor at Brooklyn Law School, will be formally honored at an investiture ceremony that celebrates both her accomplishments as a criminal law teacher and scholar, and a new professorship created through a major gift from Les Fagen, a longtime member of our adjunct faculty and a veteran trial lawyer.  

The investiture event will be hosted Oct. 1 by President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer and the Brooklyn Law School Board of Trustees. Fagen established the professorship as a tribute to the strength of the Brooklyn Law faculty and to the school’s distinctive mission of educational access for students from all backgrounds, and to honor his father, Herman Fagen ’42, a first-generation college and law graduate. 

It is a mission that resonates with Ristroph, who teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law.  

“I’m honored to receive this professorship,” Ristroph said. “The focus on our access mission, the idea that the legal profession should be open to everyone, is an aspect of this gift that is especially important to me.” 

In a similar spirit of accessibility, Ristroph released the second edition of her open-access textbook, Criminal Law: An Integrated Approach. She chose to publish with the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction to ensure that the digital edition would be free, and a printed copy would cost just $20, significantly less than the typical textbook which can run $200 to $300 each.  

In addition to the professorship, Ristroph and Fagen have a second commonality. He practiced law for more than 40 years and chaired the litigation department at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York. Ristroph worked as a litigation associate there from 2002 to 2004, practicing mostly securities and antitrust litigation, with some white-collar defense and pro bono capital work.  

 “Any new litigation associate would soon hear of Les Fagen. He was legendary,” Ristroph said. “His work inspired so many other people there.” 

Theory and Practice 

The professorship is the latest benefit of what Ristroph describes as an energizing move to join Brooklyn Law School in 2017, after previous positions on the faculty at University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, and then Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey.  

“Brooklyn Law School has a terrific faculty across many subject areas, but we’re especially fortunate to have a number of criminal law scholars in one place. The opportunity to join this community of very active and engaged criminal law scholars was not one I wanted to miss,” Ristroph said.

Her contributions have been impactful toward her colleagues as well, including Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research Jocelyn Simonson. 

“Alice’s writing has shifted my own thinking about the carceral state in multiple ways, whether it is how to conceptualize violence, how to understand the relationship between policing and the Constitution, or how to grapple with our own role as legal academics in the context of mass incarceration,” Simonson said.  “And I know that I’m not the only one; Alice’s pathbreaking work has made an impact throughout the legal academy, and especially among scholars of criminal law, criminal procedures, and criminal theory.” 

After earning first her J.D. and then a Ph.D. in political theory from Harvard University, Ristroph planned to become a political science professor, but her first teaching opportunity was a law professor position, allowing what turned out to be a welcome shift from the stratosphere of academic theory to the more concrete field of law.  

 “I thought political theorists asked important questions. But the way that political theory as a field answered those questions sometimes seemed a bit too divorced from practical consequences and the lives of everyday people,” Ristroph said. “Law addressed many of the same questions from a very concrete institutional perspective. ‘How are we going to set things up? What kinds of institutions are we going to have? What kinds of rules are we going to have? When people disagree, who has the power to decide which view will prevail?’” 

Her scholarship has addressed these themes in relation to policing, sentencing, and other topics in criminal law. Much of Ristroph’s work examines laws designed to regulate state violence. She has been working on a book, tentatively titled, "The Law of Violence," which is expected to be published by Oxford University Press in 2025.  

Questions such as what is meant by “violent crime” and how carceral political theory divides people into “criminals” and “law-abiding citizens” are among the jumping-off points within her scholarship. The role of racial inequality is woven through her discussion of criminal law.  

“I think that there were several decades in which inequality was seen as a fixable problem in criminal law, rather than part of the very core of the enterprise. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a shift in the way that most academics think and talk about and teach criminal law to recognize that inequality is intrinsic to the field,” she said.  

An avid reader whose office bookshelves are brimming with everything from Plato to Shakespeare to Simone de Beauvoir, Ristroph has a deep knowledge of Western political thought that distinguishes and drives her criminal law scholarship. Yet when studying classic liberal   theories of consent and the social contract, the law professor felt there was something missing in these accounts of how people interact with one another, establish governments, and exercise power. 

“For all the great capacities that humans have for thought and deliberation and reason, humans remain physically embodied beings, and we are vulnerable to injury and death,” she said. “In the real world, a lot of political power comes from threats of force or threats of physical violence. It is still the case that a lot of what governments accomplish, they accomplish by using or threatening physical force.” 

A native of Houston, Ristroph said her first contacts with the legal system were “involuntary,” including a jury trial in her own parents’ contested divorce.  

“It made me think carefully about how much these institutions impact people's lives, and how many decisions of great consequence are made within courts and made by legal officials,” she said. “I don't think the outcomes of those decisions are always wonderful, but I do think that it's very important to understand how the decision-making happens, and to think about ways to restructure institutions or reallocate decision- making power in order to reach better outcomes.”   

In the classroom, Ristroph deploys the same type of questioning style with students as she does in her scholarship.  

“I like a lot of discussion in the classroom. I ask students questions. I encourage them to ask me questions. I think that a classroom with many different voices and perspectives is a wonderful learning environment,” Ristroph said.  

Ristroph has long taught constitutional law alongside courses in criminal law.  She expects that constitutional law will be a major focus of her next scholarly projects. “For the past few years, I've been eager to work on some projects that are about constitutional law and not necessarily about criminal law or criminal investigations,” Ristroph said.    

She is happy to have the opportunity to do all of the above here in Brooklyn, where she and her partner, an attorney, live with their three children. “I love Brooklyn all year long, but some of the borough’s best annual moments happen in the fall. In October, I’m looking forward to the Great Pupkin (dogs in Halloween costumes in Fort Greene Park), and in November, to the street parties on Lafayette Avenue when the NYC marathon comes through.”