Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is the inaugural scholar-in-residence at the Constitutional Accountability Center. Her one-year term was made possible through generous funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour is an Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School where she teaches and writes about criminal law and procedure, evidence, and abolition. She also co-directs the law school’s Center for Criminal Justice. Her scholarship focuses on criminal procedure, particularly the right to counsel, and how race and ethnicity have impacted the jurisprudence. Professor Hoag-Fordjour’s writing has appeared in the New York University Law Review (twice), Michigan Law Review, Fordham Law Review, U.C. Davis Law Review, Harvard Law Review Blog, and other publications. She serves on the boards of the Death Penalty Information Center and the Eighth Amendment Project, and on the editorial board of the Amicus Journal. A legal contributor for CNN, Professor Hoag-Fordjour frequently provides on-air analysis for MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, NPR, CBS, and other media outlets. In 2021, she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour previously 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. Prior to academia, 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. Professor 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.