Amna A. Akbar, B.A., J.D.
Education
- JD, University of Michigan
- BA, Barnard College
Biography
Amna A. Akbar is a preeminent scholar who writes and teaches about the theories and practices of social movements and social change, criminal law, policing, race, and inequality. Her groundbreaking research has appeared in prestigious legal and social science journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, California Law Review, and NOMOS. She serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog and regularly writes for popular audiences in outlets like The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and N+1.
In 2021, Akbar was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. She also previously served as a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Akbar is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (spring) and University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law (fall). She clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and worked as a staff attorney at Queens Legal Service Corp. in a community-based battered women’s project.
This Could Be Housing; or, What is a Demand Anyway?, 125 S. Atlantic Q. 261 (2022)
Reforms for Radicals? An Abolitionist Framework, 68 UCLA L. Rev. 1544 (2022)
Movement Law, 73 Stan. L. Rev. 821 (2021)
Links: SSRN
Demands for a Democratic Political Economy, 134 Harv. L. Rev. F. 90 (2020)
Links: SSRN
An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform, 108 Calif. L. Rev. 1781 (2020)
Links: SSRN
Law, Police Violence, and Race: Grounding and Embodying the State of Exception, 23 Theory & Event 902 (2020)
Toward a Radical Imagination of Law, 93 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 405 (2018)
Links: SSRN
Missing in Action: Practice, Paralegality, and the Nature of Immigration Enforcement, 21 Citizenship Stud. 547 (2017)
Links: SSRN
Law's Exposure: The Movement and the Legal Academy, 65 J. Legal Educ. 352 (2015)
Links: SSRN
National Security's Broken Windows, 62 UCLA L. Rev. 834 (2015)
Links: SSRN