Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law where she serves as a Dean’s Research Scholar and co-directs the Center for Criminal Justice. She teaches Evidence, Criminal Procedure Adjudication, and Abolition, and her scholarship focuses on the right to counsel and how race and ethnicity have impacted its jurisprudence. Hoag-Fordjour’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review (twice), Michigan Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Harvard Law Review Blog, and other journals. Hoag-Fordjour has received teaching awards from Brooklyn Law (Faculty Member of the Year), NYU Law (Legal Teaching Award), and Vanderbilt Law (Hall-Hartman Award for Outstanding Teaching).

Prior to Brooklyn Law, Hoag-Fordjour served as 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 Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee. Hoag-Fordjour serves on the boards of the Death Penalty Information Center and the Eighth Amendment Project, and on the editorial board of the Amicus Journal. She regularly consults on criminal cases and provides trainings to indigent defense offices throughout the country. A legal contributor for CNN, Professor Hoag-Fordjour provides on-air and in-print analysis for MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, NPR, SCOTUSblog, and other media outlets. In 2021, she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

Hoag-Fordjour graduated from Yale University and NYU School of Law, where she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar. She served as a law clerk for the late Judge John T. Nixon of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.