Yale Law Professor, Pulitzer Prize Winner to Present Murray Scholarship Lecture

Yale Law Professor James Forman Jr. will discuss his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America during the 2019 Murray Excellence in Scholarship Lecture on campus.

Hosted by the School of Law, the lecture will be held on Thursday, March 21, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Power Center Ballroom, with a reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public and only $30 to register for one substantive Continuing Legal Education credit.

Forman is considered a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African-American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. The book will be available for sale and signing by the author at the event.

Locking Up Our Own won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and was longlisted for the National Book Award. It has been named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Marshall Project, Publisher’s Weekly, and GQ magazine. Reviewers have called the book “superb and shattering” (New York Times), “eloquent” and “sobering” (London Review of Books), and “moving, nuanced, and candid” (New York Review of Books). On Twitter, New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Senior called Locking Up Our Own “the best book I’ve read this year.”

The Murray Excellence in Scholarship Lecture is underwritten by the Dr. John and Liz Murray Fund for Scholarly Development.

Registration is available online. Contact Mary Serafini at 412.396.6300 for more information and to RSVP as a non-CLE guest.