James Forman, Jr., is Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.  

After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.   After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

Prof. Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011, when he joined the Yale faculty.  At Yale, he teaches Constitutional Law, a seminar called Race, Class and Punishment, and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men incarcerated in a Connecticut prison.