Alvin Bragg ’99, the 37th District Attorney for New York County, didn’t always want to practice law. He simply knew he wanted to make a difference.
“I don’t know if I knew I wanted to be a lawyer, but I knew I wanted to do something with the criminal justice system and didn’t know exactly what that would mean,” said Bragg, during an event called “Prosecution as a public service,” hosted by Harvard Law School’s Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising on Sept 10.
In a conversation moderated by Lecturer on Law Jamie Wacks ’98, Bragg’s former law school classmate, Bragg discussed with an audience of Harvard Law students the value of public service and his career as a criminal justice attorney at the federal, state, and local levels.
Bragg, who became Manhattan’s first Black district attorney in 2022 following his election the previous November, had been an assistant attorney general at the New York State Attorney General’s Office and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He also had served as chief of litigation and investigations for the New York City Council.
Describing where his interest in criminal justice began, Bragg recalled growing up in Harlem, where he experienced violence firsthand.
“[New York] City had a lot of public safety challenges then,” he said. “[I had] gunpoint incidents — three unconstitutional gunpoint stops by police and three not by the police — all of which were terrifying, and particularly the juxtaposition of the two.”
As a student at Harvard Law, Bragg remembered being “on the periphery of the public interest community,” though he credited the criminal justice law clinic with then-Professor Charles Ogletree ’78 as among his fondest academic experiences. He also credited other mentors along the way.
“I’m a huge proponent of clerking,” he said. “I clerked for a judge in the Southern District of New York, Robert Patterson. A lot of clerks think this about their judges, but he was a great person, and he was a great teacher just by being with him in court every single day.”
His judicial clerkship provided Bragg with important insight into the kind of courtroom strategies and etiquette that judges favor.
“Very helpfully, you get someone who has practiced a lot and been on the bench who can say, ‘Don’t do it that way,’ about some people who appear in front of him. And occasionally he’d say, ‘Do it like that!,’” he said. “I still think about that.”
After clerking, Bragg became an attorney for a 10-person firm in New York City, Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello, where he took on white-collar defense and civil rights policing cases. His time there provided vital hands-on experience.
“The deal was basically you were a first-year and an eighth-year all at the same time,” he said. “So, if you were relatively junior, you got to do everything, sort of up to the courthouse door.”
He advised students in the audience to pursue similar working environments regardless of their eventual long-term career path.
“Go somewhere where they’ll let you practice so that you actually learn,” he said. “If you want to practice, there’s really nothing better than doing it especially under really good supervision.”
Although Bragg’s private litigation career was short-lived, he learned valuable lessons about applying the fundamental traits of advocacy through his own lens.
“I learned that there is no secret sauce, right? Every attorney there was very effective in 10 different ways,” recalled Bragg. “There are real universal points of advocacy that they all shared. They were always honest with the court, they were always clear, etc. … It made me realize I can do this lots of different ways as long as I stick to these universal” concepts.
Still attracted to criminal justice, Bragg ultimately pivoted to the public sector, though he harbored early reservations about the transition.
“At the time, the New York State Attorney General’s office was doing a lot of what I considered very interesting work, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a prosecutor. It’s a big deal to put people in jail, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that,” he admitted.
He applied to join the Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Attorney General, but said he was “graciously” told he didn’t have enough experience. During the evaluation process, however, interviewers encouraged him to consider a role in a far different office: the Public Corruption Unit.
He joined that office, which handles complex investigations into government corruption, fraud, and abuse of authority. Although it wasn’t Bragg’s first choice, he said that the unique aspects of the unit and his position there ultimately yielded key professional insights.
“It gave me an opportunity to kind of test out prosecution in an area where I knew I felt strongly,” he said. “Those cases are undergirded by very significant power asymmetries where someone has all the power of the state, and they run afoul of it. I knew I felt comfortable doing that kind of a case and I enjoyed doing it. I found it enriching.”
“I learned something about myself there, that I enjoyed that function in some ways more than having individual clients,” he said. “I like having individual clients, but … I really love that the function is, as most prosecutors’ offices say, ‘Do the right thing in the right way for the right reason.’ I just like that being the objective.”
Bragg went on to work for the New York City Council and the Southern District of New York, before returning to the New York State Attorney General’s Office as chief deputy, where he oversaw some of the biggest cases.
Despite his passion for public service, Bragg conceded that he still grapples with certain types of cases.
“We have a lot of gun cases where the defendants are quite young … That is sobering, hard work,” he said.
Bragg is intimately familiar with the challenges those cases present to the people of New York.
“I’ve moved 20 blocks in 20 years, so I still live in Central Harlem and the lion’s share of those cases are in my neighborhood. … The proximity to a lot of it, a little piece of my heart breaks, literally. I see a very young defendant, but I also, you know, crossed the yellow line to get to my house, literally stepping over shell casings with my son, who is now 15,” he said. “You have to live a lot in the gray and sort of carry a lot of that.”
“Getting to be the decision maker in what is certainly, I would say, an imperfect system … you have to be comfortable that it isn’t perfect,” Bragg said.
Still, his current role gives him the authority and discretion needed to foster meaningful change.
“Thinking it through as the head of the office is different from doing those kinds of cases 25 years ago,” he said, because he’s now able to set priorities. “A third of our indicted cases are now [in] problem-solving courts — drug courts or mental health courts. That’s a sea change. That’s something you can really only do as head of the office.”
Between his stints as a federal prosecutor and his current position, he ran the racial justice project at New York University Law School. While there, he represented Eric Garner’s mother and sister in their civil lawsuit against the city after Garner was killed by police while being arrested.
Bragg also cited several personal outlets that help him avoid professional burnout and gave credit to younger attorneys for prioritizing personal wellness.
“I think what this generation has introduced into the profession is thinking about [health and wellness] more,” he said. “For me, I think having some physical separation helps … I have my kids, and I have a great group of old friends — the kind where whatever you do in life does not matter. Those people, you need to spend as much time with as possible.”
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