Professor Alexis Hoag Elected to Membership in American Law Institute

Professor Alexis Hoag, an expert in criminal law and civil rights, has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

The Institute—composed of 2,900 lawyers, judges, and law professors from across the United States and around the world—drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, model statutes, and principles of law that are influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education. ALI membership is gained only through election by existing ALI members and is limited to 3,000 individuals (excluding life, honorary, and ex-officio members).

“I’m honored to join this distinguished group of practitioners, judges, and legal scholars, and look forward to advancing ALI’s mission of clarifying and modernizing the law, while helping to improve the administration of justice,” said Hoag. “I will strive to give full voice to the range of my professional experiences as they relate to ALI’s work on criminal law and procedure, evidence, and policing.”

Hoag, who joined the faculty in 2021, teaches and writes in criminal law and procedure, evidence, and carceral abolition. Her recent scholarship examines the ways in which policies, doctrines, and practices within the criminal legal system erode people’s constitutional rights and perpetuate racial subordination. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Harvard Law Review Blog, and other journals. She serves on the editorial board of the Amicus Journal and co-chairs the capital punishment committee of the New York City Bar Association. Hoag is a legal contributor for CBSNews, and regularly provides on-air and in print analysis for MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and other media outlets.

Prior to joining the Law School, Hoag 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 and the Office of the Federal Public Defender. She 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 Judge John T. Nixon of the United States District Court.

Other ALI members from the Law School faculty include Dean Michael T. Cahill; Professors William D. Araiza, Miriam H. Baer, Anita Bernstein, Dana Brakman Reiser, Neil B. Cohen, James A. Fanto, Andrew Gold, Edward J. Janger, Beryl R. Jones-Woodin, Roberta S. Karmel, Brian A. Lee, Samuel K. Murumba, David Reiss, Alice Ristroph, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Winnie F. Taylor, and Aaron D. Twerski; Marsha Garrison, 1901 Distinguished Research Professor; Professors Emeriti William E. Hellerstein and Norman S. Poser; and Joan G. Wexler, dean and president emerita.