James Forman Jr.
Legal scholar and author
James Forman Jr. is an American legal scholar and Yale Law School professor. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Locking Up Our Own.
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American Born 1967 in New York City, United States
About James Forman Jr.
After law school at Yale, Forman worked as a clerk for Judge William Norris on the 9th Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He then spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., representing both juveniles and adults. In 1997 he co-founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School with David Domenici, offering a different path to young people who had left school or had been arrested. Forman has been on the Yale Law School faculty since 2011, and his teaching includes constitutional law and a course titled Race, Class, and Punishment. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America was his first book. He has also written for the New York Times and the Atlantic, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2023.