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Professor Alexander named to Power 100 list

February 8, 2012

Contact: Barbara Peck, (614) 292-0283

Associate Professor of Law Michelle Alexander has been selected for On Being A Black Lawyer’s Power 100 list, which highlights the nation’s most influential black attorneys working in government, academics, and public and private sectors.

Alexander holds a joint appointment with The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. She has extensive experience in the field of civil rights advocacy and litigation in private practice and the nonprofit sector. For several years, Alexander served as director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement.

Most recently, Alexander has been lauded for her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, published in 2010 by The New Press. Alexander’s research of the more than 2 million inmates incarcerated in the United States today found that the system ensures “the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” The War on Drugs, she contends, has created “a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from the mainstream society.”

In other words, the classification of “felon” serves, metaphorically, as the new Jim Crow.

By examining the rise of mass incarceration over the past 30 years, Alexander found more black men were in prison or jail and on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.

The New Jim Crow has been cited in scores of news articles and academic blogs, and she has delivered lectures across the country following its publication. Alexander also received an NAACP Image Award in the category of Oustanding Literary Work – Nonfiction for the book in 2011.

Joining Alexander on the On Being A Black Lawyer Power 100 list in the category of Public Intellectuals are: Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School; Professor Anita Hill, Brandeis University; Professor Devon Carbado, UCLA School of Law; Professor Stephen Carter, Yale Law School; Professor Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School; Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, UCLA School of Law; Professor Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School; and Professor Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford Law School.

Alexander will be honored at a reception Feb. 29 in Washington, D.C.

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