Pinellas Times

Stetson University College of Law issued the following announcement on Jan. 30.

Stetson University College of Law is excited to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Yale Law School Professor James Forman Jr. to campus as the keynote speaker for the Annual Inns of Court Banquet and Wm. Reece Smith, Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Feb. 5, 2020.

Professor Forman is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and his book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and featured on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017.

He has devoted much of his career to working with people who have been incarcerated. As a member of the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., he spent six years representing juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

During his time as a public defender, Forman became so frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients that he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, the institution expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff. The court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”

Professor Forman, a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011 before joining the Yale faculty. At Yale, he teaches Criminal Law and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons.

He teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions.

Professor Forman’s lecture will be a wonderful addition to Stetson Law’s Annual Inns of Court Banquet, which brings together prominent lawyers, experienced teachers, and law students to exchange ideas, experiences, and education. The event includes The Wm. Reece Smith, Jr. Distinguished Lecture in Ethics, as well as the Wm. Reece Smith, Jr. Award. Both are named in honor of the legendary Florida lawyer who served as founder of Florida Legal Services, president of the International, American and Florida Bar Associations, a distinguished professorial lecturer at Stetson Law, and a member of the Stetson Law’s Hall of Fame.

Original source can be found here.