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Presented By: University of Michigan Law School

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Lecture- Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Professor James Forman, Yale Law School

Please join Michigan Law as we commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a lecture by Professor James Forman of Yale Law School. Professor Forman will discuss his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which explores how decisions made by black leaders, often with the best of intentions, contributed to disproportionately incarcerating black and brown people.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

James Forman Jr. is one of the nation’s leading authorities on race, education, and the criminal justice system, and a tireless advocate for young people who others have written off. Professor Forman attended Yale Law School, and after he graduated, worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he took a job at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases.

Professor Forman loved being a public defender, but he quickly became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. The Maya Angelou school has been open for almost twenty years, and in that time has helped hundreds of vulnerable young people find a second chance, begin to believe in themselves, graduate, get jobs, and attend college.

At Yale Law School, where has taught since 2011, Professor Forman teaches Constitutional Law and a course called Race, Class, and Punishment. Last year he took his teaching behind prison walls, offering a seminar called Inside-Out Prison Exchange: Issues in Criminal Justice, which brought together, in the same classroom, 10 Yale Law students and 10 men incarcerated in a CT prison.

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