Amna A. Akbar

Professor Amna A. Akbar is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. Akbar writes and teaches about the theories and practices of social movements and social change, and policing, race, and inequality. Her academic work has appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Southern Atlantic Quarterly, Theory and Event, NOMOS, and more. Akbar’s popular essays and op-eds have appeared in the venues like the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin. She’s at work on a book project on non-reformist reforms.

In the 2018-2019 academic year, Professor Akbar was a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In 2021, she was honored as a Marguerite E. Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. In Spring 2023, Akbar served as a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Law School. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Akbar is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law.

Professor Akbar serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog. She is a current or past member of the boards of Ohio Voice, Law for Black Lives, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is affiliated with the Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies at Ohio State.

Prior to Moritz, Professor Akbar taught at New York University (NYU) Law School and the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School in their clinical programs. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her JD from the University of Michigan, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and worked as a staff attorney at Queens Legal Service Corp.