James Forman, Jr.

James Forman, Jr. was raised on civil rights, but as an adult he has taken the tradition in new directions. His parents met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a major force in the civil rights movement in the 1960's. His father, James Forman, Sr., was SNCC's executive secretary; his mother was a civil rights activist and nurse. So when as a young man Forman entered Yale Law School, it was only natural that he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. But his trajectory since then illustrates an important lesson about civil rights in the 21 st century, and about where as a professor Forman wants to move the struggle.

As a law student, Professor Forman spent both summers working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pursuing his dream to become a civil rights lawyer. As a law clerk for Judge William Norris on the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, however, Forman grew increasingly troubled by the embarrassing records of inadequate legal counsel he saw in countless criminal appeals. Abandoning the more traditional civil rights career he seemed born for, he went to work at a public defender in Washington, D.C.

At the time, most of the civil rights community was still focused on traditional issues like employment, education, and housing. But Forman saw criminal justice as itself a civil rights issue - a view that years later has now been embraced by virtually the entire civil rights movement.

As a lawyer principally defending kids from the District's high poverty neighborhoods, however, Forman soon began to confront the limits of his role as criminal defense lawyer. In the best of circumstances, he would send his clients back to the bad situation from which they came. He was able to defend them in the courtroom, but not to help them stay out of the courtroom altogether.

He began working with David Domenici, son of U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, on a solution. They asked Forman's clients what they needed, and the answer was "work." So they began an after-school program that offered kids who had had trouble in the criminal justice system a job and tutoring. Soon realizing that an after-care program was not enough, Forman took a leave of absence, and in 1997 he and Domenici launched a private tuition-free school, funded by private foundations, and directed, again, toward helping kids in trouble. A year later, the Maya Angelou School (named for Forman's godmother) became a charter school. In 2003, Forman and Domenici received funding to expand to three additional schools in the District over the next seven years. The initial expansion has been a success; in the fall of 2004, Maya Angelou opened a second campus in partnership with the D.C. Public School system.

Forman's goal as a scholar is to bring the lessons he has learned in criminal justice and at the Maya Angelou School back to law school. At Georgetown, he teaches and writes in the area of Criminal Procedure and Education Law and Policy. His recent publications include: The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First, forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal; From Martin Luther King to Bill Cosby: Race and Class in the 21 st Century, published in the Villanova Law Review in 2005, Community Policing and Youth as Assets, published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 2004; and Juries and Race in the Nineteenth Century, published in the Yale Law Journal in 2004.

As a teacher, Forman tries to bring his experience from the world into the classroom. For example, in his Criminal Justice class he doesn't teach only Supreme Court doctrine on the warrant requirement and its bevy of exceptions. He also brings into the class the people who actually work in the criminal justice system and its related public services. In all of his courses, Professor Forman tries to teach students that there are more ways to advance civil rights than filing cases, and that perhaps the most useful thing they can do is to get involved in the nitty-gritty of direct services for the poorest of the poor.

Based on his scholarship and teaching, Forman was recently featured as one of 10 outstanding young scholars by the magazine Black Issues in Higher Education.