Professors Alexis Hoag, Civil Rights Lawyer, and Andrew Jennings, Expert in Corporate Governance, to Join Faculty

Two new faculty members will be joining the Law School in July 2021. Alexis Hoag, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, will be joining from Columbia Law School, and corporate governance expert Andrew Jennings from Stanford Law School.

“We are thrilled to be welcoming Alexis and Andrew to the faculty this fall,” said Dean Michael T. Cahill. “These two brilliant and talented additions to our faculty will build on, and carry forward, the existing strengths of our criminal and business law curriculum, scholarship, and academic centers. We are fortunate to have them joining us.”

Alexis Hoag

Alexis Hoag is the inaugural practitioner-in-residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia Law School. Prior to academia, she spent over a decade as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer. She plans to teach classes in evidence, criminal law and procedure, and an upper-level seminar in prison abolition.

Hoag’s scholarship examines the ways in which policies, doctrines, and practices within the criminal legal system erode people’s constitutional rights and perpetuate racial subordination. In her forthcoming article, “Black on Black Representation,” 96 New York University Law Review __ (2021), she argues that an expansion of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel of choice could help combat structural racism within the criminal legal system. She also serves on the editorial board of the Amicus Journal and chairs the capital punishment committee of the New York City Bar Association.

Hoag previously served as senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she represented clients in a variety of civil and criminal matters, including Davis, et al. v. City of New York and New York City Housing Authority, a federal class action lawsuit seeking systemic reform of the New York City Police Department’s discriminatory practices against Black and Latinx public housing residents and guests. As an assistant federal public defender in Nashville, Tenn., Hoag primarily represented clients convicted of capital offenses in federal post-conviction proceedings. She has authored amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court and state supreme courts challenging the sentences of individuals convicted of capital offenses.

Hoag graduated from Yale College and NYU School of Law, where she was a Derrick Bell Public Interest Scholar and an editor on the Review of Law and Social Change. She clerked for the Hon. John T. Nixon of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.

“I’ve been fortunate to have already partnered with members of Brooklyn Law School’s faculty, examining ways to transform the criminal legal system, doctrinally and in practice,” said Hoag. “I am thrilled to continue this work, and to mentor and guide students as they form their professional identities as lawyers.”

Andrew Jennings

Andrew Jennings is a lecturer in law and the teaching fellow for the Corporate Governance & Practice program at Stanford Law School. He will be teaching classes in corporate law and securities regulation.

Jennings’s research interests focus on corporate governance and compliance, securities regulation, and white-collar crime. In “Follow-Up Enforcement,” 70 Duke Law Journal __ (forthcoming 2021), he looks at how enforcement agencies reduce corporate penalties for promises of reform. Such arrangements can pose problems, and he proposes ways to mitigate them.

Jennings is also the creator and host of the Business Scholarship Podcast, where he interviews business scholars about their recent research. In addition to legal scholars, he also interviews experts in accounting, business, and other related fields. Recent episodes have focused on non-shareholder victims of corporate misconduct, mandatory arbitration clauses, and litigation financing.

Jennings was previously a scholar in residence at Duke Law School and a law clerk to the Hon. Helene N. White of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he handled mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance matters, and at Sullivan & Cromwell, where he practiced in criminal defense and investigations and civil litigation.

Jennings earned degrees from Hampden-Sydney College and Duke University School of Law, where he concurrently earned a master’s degree in economics while serving as executive editor of Duke Law Journal.

“I started out practicing law in New York City before going to Stanford and am looking forward to coming back to the heart of our nation’s capital markets,” said Jennings. “As a securities scholar, I wanted to be at a place I could have real-world impact, and Brooklyn Law School offers great opportunities for me to do just that.”