Dreyfous Lecture

James Forman, Jr., Yale Law Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own, is the George Abel and Mathilde Schwab Dreyfous Lecturer this fall at Tulane Law. Professor Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prisons. He is particularly interested in the race and class dimensions of those institutions. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was on many top 10 lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change published in July, by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Co-edited by Forman, Premal Dharia and Mario Hawilo, the anthology focuses on how to undo the damage and depredations of the carceral state.

In September 2020, Forman convened 12 Yale Law students and 20 first-generation New Haveners for a novel experiment in legal education: a law-student run pipeline program helping people from under-represented groups achieve their dreams of becoming lawyers. To date, over 18 program participants have been admitted to law school, including to UConn, Quinnipiac, Yale, Villanova, American University, Berkeley, Georgetown, and Western New England. In January 2022, Forman helped launch the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center, which brings together New Haveners, Yale students, staff, and faculty, local government officials, and local and national experts to imagine and implement projects advancing racial justice.

The Lecture will take place on Thursday, October 24, at 5 p.m., room 110 of the John Giffen Weinmann Hall, 6329 Freret Street, New Orleans.