Addressing the Crisis in Policing Today: Race, Masculinity, and Police Use of Force in America

Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of expertise include law and sociology, law and inequality, policing and the criminal legal system, welfare and public benefits law, housing law and residential segregation, and race and the law. Monica's scholarship aims to center the voices and experiences of people who experience exclusion through specific bodies of law and their implementation. She uses multiple techniques for analysis, theory construction, and data presentation, with an emphasis on qualitative methodology and inductive theory building.

Monica's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, American Journal of Sociology, NYU Law Review, Law & Society Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. She has also published writing in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Appeal.

A first-generation college graduate from Upstate South Carolina, Monica holds a BA from Furman University, an MSc from University College Dublin, a J.D. from Yale, and a PhD in Sociology & Social Policy from Harvard. She clerked for the Hon. Cameron McGowan Currie of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. Monica has been honored as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and a George Mitchell Scholar, and she has worked as a Liman Fellow for the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia.

In 2019, Monica received the Yale Law Women Faculty Excellence Award on a vote of the Yale Law School student body. In 2021-2022, Monica will be a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Donald Braman is an associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, teaching Criminal Law and Evidence. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow at Yale Law School. His article “Punishment and Accountability,” was published by the UCLA Law Review.

Paul Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a legal analyst on MSNBC. During the 2017-18 academic year he was the Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He holds an honorary Doctor of Law Degree from City University of New York.  

Professor Butler is one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and The ABC, CBS, and NBC Evening News. He lectures regularly for the American Bar Association and the NAACP, and at colleges, law schools, and community organizations throughout the United States. He serves on the District of Columbia Code Revision Commission as an appointee of  the D.C. City Council.  

Professor Butler’s scholarship has been published in many leading scholarly journals, including the Georgetown Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. He was named the Professor of the Year award three times by the GW graduating class. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2003. Professor Butler’s book “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice” received the Harry Chapin Media award. 

His book Chokehold: Policing Black Men was published in July 2017. The Washington Post named it one of the 50 best non-fiction books of 2017. Chokehold was also named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The New York Times described Chokehold as the best book on criminal justice reform since The New Jim Crow. It was a finalist for the 2018 NAACP Image Award for best non-fiction.

Professor Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. His prosecutions included a United States Senator, three FBI agents, and several other law enforcement officials.  

Professor Butler is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.

Kami Chavis is a Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest University School of Law. In 2015, she was appointed as a Senior Academic Fellow at the Joint Center for Political And Economic Studies. She has substantial practice experience and writes and teaches in areas related to criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice reform. After receiving her J.D. from Harvard Law School, she worked as an associate at private law firms in Washington, D.C., where she participated in various aspects of civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense, and internal investigations. In 2003, she became an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, involving her in a wide range of criminal prosecutions and in arguing and briefing appeals before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Professor Chavis frequently makes presentations on law-enforcement issues and is a leader in the field of police accountability. Her articles have appeared in the American Criminal Law Review, the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the University of Alabama Law Review, and the Catholic University Law Review, and other legal journals. Her research focuses on using Cooperative Federalism principles and stakeholder participation to implement sustainable reforms in the criminal justice system. She writes in the areas of police and prosecutorial accountability, federal hate crimes legislation and enforcement, and racial profiling. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2012.

She is a frequent contributor to national and international media outlets and has appeared on CNN, CTV, and NPR. She has written for the New York Times and the Huffington Post, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, U.S. News and World Report, International Business Times, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets regarding police accountability and the structural reform of law enforcement agencies.

Mary M. Cheh joined the law school faculty in 1979 after being in private practice with Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Kampelman in Washington, D.C., and serving as a law clerk to the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Professor Cheh teaches and writes primarily in the areas of constitutional law and criminal procedure. While on sabbatical leave in 1986, she served as a special assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. In an earlier leave in 1983, she did pro bono work for the Centre for Applied Legal Studies in South Africa. Professor Cheh has served as a consultant to the National Institute of Justice and the President’s Commission on Organized Crime. She is a frequent speaker and media commentator on legal affairs.

Julian A. Cook III is a J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law.  

Specializing in criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence, Cook served for several years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Nevada and the District of Columbia. While a federal prosecutor and a member of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, he was responsible for the handling of an array of criminal matters, including felony narcotic, white-collar, and various arrest-generated cases during the trial and appellate stages. He also served as a judicial clerk for Judge Philip M. Pro of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.

His law review articles have been published (or are forthcoming) in an array of law journals, including the Boston College Law Review, the Brigham Young University Law Review, the Colorado Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review Online, the U.C.L.A. Law Review Discourse, the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, the Wake Forest Law Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law. In addition, he is an author or co-author of three books, Inside Investigative Criminal Procedure (Wolters Kluwer), Inside Adjudicative Criminal Procedure (Wolters Kluwer), and Trial Handbook for Georgia Lawyers (West) (with R. Carlson and M. Carlson).  

He earned his bachelor's degree from Duke University, his Master of Public Administration from Columbia University, and his Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia.

Frank Rudy Cooper is William S. Boyd Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Race, Gender & Policing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law. He is a productive scholar known for work in intersectionality theory and policing. His publications include co-editing the book, Masculinities and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach (NYU Press 2012), and have appeared in, inter alia, the Boston University Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, Illinois Law Review, and the Arizona State Law Journal. Professor Cooper is a highly rated teacher of Criminal Law; Civil Rights; Constitutional Law; Criminal Procedure: Investigation; and Race, Gender & Law. His service to his law schools has included serving on the Dean’s Advisory Council (elected) and chairing Teaching, Tenure, and Scholarship committees. Under his direction, the Program on Race, Gender & Policing will edit a 2021 symposium on race and gender and policing in the Nevada Law Journal. It also convenes panels aimed at legal scholars, students, and community activists, both on-campus and off. He has been a leader nationally as well, having co-founded both the SALT-LatCrit Junior Faculty Development Workshop and the John Mercer Langston Writing Workshop.

Roger A. Fairfax, Jr. is Professor of Law, the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor, and Founding Director of the Criminal Law & Policy Initiative. Professor Fairfax served as the Jeffrey and Martha Kohn Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2015-2019, and as Associate Dean for Public Engagement from 2014-2015.

Professor Fairfax teaches courses in criminal law, constitutional and adjudicatory criminal procedure, criminal litigation, prosecutorial and criminal defense ethics, and seminars on the grand jury, white-collar criminal investigations, criminal defense, and criminal justice policy. He conducts research on discretion in the criminal process, the grand jury, prosecutorial ethics, and criminal justice policy and reform.

His scholarship has been published in edited books, including his own Grand Jury 2.0: Modern Perspectives on the Grand Jury, and in articles and essays appearing in a number of leading journals including the Boston College Law Review, Cornell Law Review, U.C. Davis Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.  He is the author of Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure: Cases, Statutes, and Materials, published by Foundation Press.

Before joining the law school faculty, Professor Fairfax served as a federal prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented the United States in a broad range of public corruption investigations and prosecutions. During his time in the Attorney General's Honors Program, he also served details as Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and as special assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of DOJ.

Following his government service, Professor Fairfax was a Counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where his practice included white-collar criminal and regulatory defense, internal investigations, complex civil litigation, and strategic counseling, as well as pro bono indigent criminal defense, appellate, and civil rights litigation. 

Professor Fairfax has engaged in expert consultation and pro bono representation in internal investigations and in grand jury, trial, and appellate matters in state, federal, and foreign courts.  He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and a variety of federal trial and appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Fairfax has testified before Congress, spoken at the White House, and advised local, state, and national government officials and candidates on criminal justice policy. He worked on criminal justice reform as a Senior Legislative Fellow with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism and as a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute. Professor Fairfax was appointed by Governor Martin O'Malley, and confirmed by the Maryland Senate, to the Board of Trustees of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, and also served as Chair of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Commission in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Professor Fairfax graduated with honors from Harvard College, the University of London, and Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Heyman Fellowship for Government Service. Professor Fairfax clerked for Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and for Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Professor Fairfax is a member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, a barrister of the Edward Bennett Williams Inn of Court, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and an elected member of the American Law Institute.  In 2019, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Professor Fairfax to serve on the Judicial Conference of the United States, Advisory Committee for the Rules of Criminal Procedure. 

Professor Mary D. Fan holds the Jack R. MacDonald Endowed Chair in Law at the University of Washington. Her work is informed by her experiences as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California and as an Associate Legal Officer at a United Nations international criminal tribunal. 

Professor Fan has won awards for her teaching and research and is the author of numerous articles. Professor Fan’s latest book is Camera Power: Proof, Policing, Privacy, and Audiovisual Big Data (Cambridge University Press 2019).  Her next book project is Perilous Science: Persistence and Survival in Politically Dangerous Research Domains (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2022).

Trained in epidemiology, social anthropology, and law, Professor Fan also collaborates on violence prevention research as a core faculty member at Harborview Medical Center’s Injury Prevention and Research Center.  She is an elected member of the American Law Institute.  Professor Fan was the 2019 Chair of the Law & Anthropology Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).  She also sits on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington.  She received her JD from Yale Law School and her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Justin Hansford, District of Columbia, is a professor of law at the Howard University School of Law and executive director of the new Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. Professor Hansford was previously a Democracy Project Fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and an associate professor of Law at Saint Louis University. He has a BA from Howard University and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a founder of the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives. Hansford also has received a Fulbright Scholar award to study the legal career of Nelson Mandela and served as a clerk for Judge Damon J. Keith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Hansford is a leading scholar and activist in the areas of critical race theory, human rights, and law and social movements. He is a co-author of the forthcoming Seventh Edition of “Race, Racism and American Law,” the celebrated legal textbook that was the first casebook published specifically for teaching race-related law courses. His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in academic journals at various universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, Fordham, and the University of California at Hastings.

In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Hansford worked to empower the Ferguson community through community-based legal advocacy. He co-authored the Ferguson to Geneva human rights shadow report and accompanied the Ferguson protesters and Mike Brown’s family to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify at the United Nations. He has served as a policy advisor for proposed post-Ferguson reforms at the local, state, and federal level, testifying before the Ferguson Commission, the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

David A. Harris is the Sally Ann Semenko Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school, where he teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and other courses.  Prof. Harris devotes his research and writing to the study of police conduct, search and seizure law, and the intersection of race and criminal justice.  He’s the leading national authority on racial profiling; his 2002 book Profiles in Injustice and his many scholarly articles on the topic resulted in new laws and regulations in hundreds of American police departments. His latest book, A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law in Police Confrontations, published this year by Anthem Press, uses a case of police violence against a young man in Pittsburgh to ask why these incidents keep happening, and what we can do to stop this. 

Professor Harris is also the creator and host of the Criminal Injustice podcast, devoted since 2016 to interviews with justice system actors on the most difficult problems in the criminal system.  In Pittsburgh and in other communities around the country, he’s applied his work to creating better relationships between police and the communities they serve, to bring about both respectful, just policing, and public safety.  This work resulted in David receiving the Jefferson Award for Public Service in 2015.  

Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she supervises law students and represents youth accused of delinquency in the D.C. Superior Court. Professor Henning was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center. 

Professor Henning writes extensively about race, policing, and the juvenile justice system. Her work appears in journals and books such as Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment (2017, edited by Angela J. Davis). Of particular note for our conference are her articles The Reasonable Black Child: Race, Adolescence and the Fourth Amendment, 67 Am. U. L. Rev. 1513 (2018), Race, Paternalism and the Right to Counsel, 54 Amer. Crim. L. Rev. 649 (2017), and Criminalizing Normal Adolescent Behavior in Communities of Color: The Role of Prosecutors in Juvenile Justice Reform, 98 Cornell L. Rev. 383 (2013). Professor Henning is also the editor of an anthology Rights, Race, and Reform: Fifty Years of Child Advocacy in the Juvenile Justice System (2018) and is writing a book about the criminalization of Black adolescence, forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Professor Henning trains and consults with state actors and community leaders committed to challenging racial bias and injustice in the juvenile and criminal legal systems across the country. In January 2020, Professor Henning launched a year-long Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and developed a Racial Justice Toolkit for Defenders in partnership with the National Juvenile Defender Center to provide defenders with resources and support they need to challenge racial injustice in their direct advocacy and systemic reform efforts. 

Professor Cynthia Lee is the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure and Professional Responsibility. She is the author of Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom. She also has a Criminal Law and a Criminal Procedure casebook with West and has edited an anthology on the Fourth Amendment. Much of Professor Lee’s scholarship has focused on implicit racial bias and the doctrine of self-defense. She has also written extensively on the doctrine of provocation and gay and trans panic. Her recent scholarship has focused on the law on police use of deadly force.

Christy E. Lopez is a Professor from Practice at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington D.C. She teaches courses on policing and criminal procedure and co-directs Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program, including the Police for Tomorrow Fellowship and the ABLE (Active Bystandership in Law Enforcement) Project. She currently is co-chair of the Washington D.C. Police Reform Commission. She also is a Fellow on the American Law Institute (ALI) Principles of Law, Policing, Project and a contributing columnist to the Washington Post opinions page.

From 2010 to 2017, Professor Lopez served as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She led the Division’s group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of police departments and other law enforcement agencies, including litigating, negotiating, and implementing consent decrees. Professor Lopez directly led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department and was a primary drafter of the Ferguson Report and negotiator of the Ferguson consent decree. Professor Lopez also helped coordinate the Department’s broader efforts to ensure constitutional policing. Professor Lopez was a Senior Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division from 1995 to 2000.

From 2003 to 2010, Professor Lopez served as a federal court monitor of the Oakland (California) Police Department for Senior District Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the Northern District of California. Professor Lopez holds a JD from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Riverside.

Eric J. Miller is a professor and Leo J. O’Brien Fellow at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure, jurisprudence, critical race theory, reparations, and problem-solving courts. Professor Miller is a former Chair of the AALS Section on Criminal Justice, and a co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook on Policing in America (2019), as well as co-founder of the Policing Los Angeles Forum, which brings legal academics, law enforcement personnel, lawyers, policy-makers, and activists together to propose innovative policing reforms. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of criminal justice with political theory, sociology, and criminology. 

Professor Miller is an internationally recognized expert on problem-solving justice and speciality courts, as well as on the police and policing, and on reparations for African Americans.  He has provided testimony to the United States Congress House Judiciary Committee, the United States Sentencing Commission, the Federal Judicial Center's National Workshop for U.S. Magistrate Judges; the Eighth Circuit Chief Judges Conference, and internationally to the Scottish Commission on Women Offenders and the Scottish Government Judicial Studies Committee.  

Professor Miller received an LLB from the University of Edinburgh, and an LLM from Harvard Law School, where he was also a Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow. He clerked for the Hon. Myron H. Thompson in the Middle District of Alabama and the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

His publications include:

The Cambridge Handbook of Policing in America (Eric J. Miller & Tamara R. Lave, eds. (2019)
The Moral Burdens of Police Wrongdoing, 96 Res Philosophica 219 (2020)
Encountering Resistance: Non-Compliance, Non-Cooperation and Procedural Justice, 2016 U.  Chicago Legal Forum 2016
Role-Based Policing: Restraining Police Conduct “Outside the Legitimate Investigative Sphere,” 94 Cal. L. Rev. 617 (2006)

Josephine Ross is a professor of law at Howard University School of Law. In her forthcoming book, A Feminist Critique of Police Stops published by Cambridge University Press, Ross takes on stops, frisks, and the consent doctrine. Harnessing feminist arguments against traditional rape law where consent was found except when aggressors used force and violence, Ross exposes the same forces at work in the current law on consent stops, consent searches, and consensual interrogations. The book indicts the original Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio that allows police to stop and frisk on less than probable cause, shows how consent doctrine intersects with Terry, and calls for the abolition of stop and frisk policing. Professor Ross teaches Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and occasionally a seminar on the television show The Wire. She supervised students in a Criminal Justice Clinic for a decade and recently created and teaches a Reentry Clinic. She has taught courses at Boston College Law School, Michigan State University, and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. One of her articles, What the #MeToo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk, examines the problem of police sexual assault. 

Stephen Rushin teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Police Accountability at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests include police reform, criminal sentencing, civil rights, and empirical legal studies. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, among other journals. Cambridge University Press published his book, Federal Intervention in American Police Departments, in 2017. Numerous national media outlets have featured his research or expertise.

Read his forthcoming article, "An Empirical Assessment of Pretextual Stops and Racial Profiling."

Seth Stoughton is an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where he studies policing. He is a former city police officer and state investigator. His book, Evaluating Police Uses of Force, with criminologist Geoff Alpert and former police executive Jeff Noble, examines the various legal and social standards under which the propriety of police violence is assessed.

Kate Weisburd's primary interests are in the areas of criminal investigation, adjudication, and post-conviction law as they relate to the street-level implementation of criminal justice reform. In particular, Professor Weisburd's research focuses on alternatives to incarceration, including the emerging and varied forms of electronic surveillance and mechanized probation. Her recent scholarly work has appeared in the Iowa Law Review and the UCLA Law Review, and she has written for The Marshall Project as well as other mainstream media.

Prior to joining GW Law, Professor Weisburd founded and directed the Youth Defender Clinic at the East Bay Community Law Center, which is part of the clinical program at UC Berkeley School of Law and the largest provider of free legal services in the county. In that role, she taught and supervised law students representing young people in juvenile court and school discipline proceedings. In addition to her clinical teaching responsibilities, Professor Weisburd served as a lecturer at Berkeley Law, teaching courses on the school-to-prison pipeline. Prior to creating the Youth Defender Clinic, she was a fellow and supervising attorney in Berkeley Law's Death Penalty Clinic. In both clinics, Professor Weisburd maintained her own caseload and represented clients at trial, on appeal and in post-conviction proceedings.   

Professor Weisburd graduated from Columbia Law School, where she received the Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann Fellowship for Public Interest, and the Public Interest Peer-of-the-Year award. Prior to attending law school, she  worked as an investigator in death penalty cases at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia. Professor Weisburd received her BA from Brown University, where she was a Truman Scholar. She clerked for the Honorable Lawrence K. Karlton in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

Jordan Blair Woods is an Associate Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Richard B. Atkinson LGBTQ Law & Policy Program at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Woods’ research focuses on the regulation of law enforcement, criminal justice issues affecting LGBTQ populations, and the regulation of youth in family and child welfare contexts. His recent scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review Online, among other journals.  

Woods’ article “Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traffic Stops,” 117 Michigan Law Review 635 (2019), was selected for presentation at the 2018 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Woods is also a two-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best sexual orientation and gender identity law review articles published each year (“LGBT Identity and Crime,” 105 California Law Review 667 (2017); “Unaccompanied Youth and Private-Public Order Failures,” 103 Iowa Law Review 1639 (2018)). In 2019, Woods was named as a Harry Krause Emerging Family Law Scholar by the University of Illinois College of Law’s Family Law and Policy Program. For four consecutive years since joining the law faculty, Woods has been awarded the University of Arkansas Faculty Commendation for Teaching Commitment. 

Prior to joining the law faculty, Woods served as a fellow at the Williams Institute, a research institute on LGBT law and public policy at UCLA School of Law. He clerked for the Honorable Jennifer Walker Elrod on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Woods holds an AB from Harvard College, JD from UCLA School of Law, and MPhil and PhD in criminology from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar.