Amna A. Akbar

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 criminal law, 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, South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory and Event, NOMOS, and more. She 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).

Akbar received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her J.D. from the University of Michigan, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. 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.