Professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour to Receive Derrick A. Bell Award at AALS
Professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Dean’s Research Scholar, has been selected to receive the prestigious 2025 Derrick A. Bell Award at the upcoming Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Conference.
The Minority Law Teacher’s Section of the AALS established the Derrick Bell Award to honor a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching, or scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. It was named after the late Derrick A. Bell Jr., the first tenured African American faculty member at Harvard Law School.
“It is wonderful to see Alexis receive this very well-deserved national recognition for her leadership and innovative scholarly contributions in the field of criminal law reform and social justice,” Dean David D. Meyer said. Associate Dean Jocelyn Simonson added, “The Derrick Bell Award is a fitting recognition for Professor Hoag-Fordjour, because she combines mentorship and community-building with social and legal critique in ways that benefit us all, and always with a reminder of the deep inequalities with which we must contend as we push for a better world.”
Hoag-Fordjour, who joined the faculty in 2021, teaches Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and Abolition. Her innovative teaching style, where she incorporates critical race theory, popular culture, and real-world scenarios into classroom discussions, has made her a favorite among students. The Brooklyn Law School Student Bar Association named Hoag-Fordjour Faculty Member of the Year in 2021–22 and again in 2023-24.
She is currently serving a one-year term as the inaugural scholar-in-residence at the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), a nonprofit progressive think tank and law firm in Washington, D.C. While at CAC, she is conducting research relying on the history, text, and spirit of Reconstruction to provide a clarifying framework for interpreting constitutional rights in the present.
Her most recent article, Back to the Future: (Re)Constructing Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, appearing in the UC Davis Law Review, explores a new way of determining ineffective assistance of counsel rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. In addition, she has three forthcoming projects slated for publication: the first is a responsive essay, Client Counseling in Post-Conviction, in the Boston University Law Review; the second is a full-length article, Universal Public Defense, appearing in the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review; and the third is a book chapter, Defining Expertise: A Critical Approach to Police Officer Testimony, in Critical Evidence (Cambridge University Press, 2026), edited by I. Bennett Capers, Jasmine Harris, and Julia Simon-Kerr.
The Derrick Bell Award also recognizes Hoag-Fordjour’s longstanding commitment to activism and social justice advocacy. Her efforts are focused on alleviating racial inequality, shrinking the carceral system, and civil rights. She frequently provides statewide and national trainings for public defenders, focusing on client-centered representation, litigating racial discrimination claims, and navigating new issues in Sixth Amendment jurisprudence. A former capital appellate defender, Hoag-Fordjour is active in advocating against the death penalty and serves on the boards of the Death Penalty Information Center, the Eighth Amendment Project, and chaired the NYC Bar Association Capital Punishment Committee. She supports appellate attorneys representing people on death row, authoring expert reports on racial discrimination in jury selection and amicus briefs clarifying appellate procedure. Hoag-Fordjour uses her platform as a professor to provide legal commentary in print, radio, and television, giving nuanced arguments about racism and injustice on contemporary legal issues.
The award will be presented on January 10, 2025, at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.