Biography
Alec is the Founder of Civil Rights Corps. He graduated from Yale College with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review.
Alec has pioneered constitutional civil rights cases to challenge the size, power, profit, and everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States. These legal challenges have helped to free hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells, returned tens of millions of dollars to indigent people and families, blocked billions in government spending on state violence, prevented hundreds of thousands of illegal convictions, prevented the separation of hundreds of thousands of families, and transformed the way the punishment bureaucracy handles fines, fees, and bail across the United States. Alec has also worked with the communities most affected by the punishment bureaucracy across the country to design innovative new legal, advocacy, and narrative strategies for challenging widespread illegal and harmful practices of prosecutors, police, probation officers, judges, and private companies who work with them to profit from the punishment bureaucracy.
Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law.
Alec is the author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (2019), which his grandmother likes. He is also the author of Copaganda (2025), which his grandmother likes even more. He appears widely in television, radio, podcasts, documentary films, and loving debates with friends. He also lectures widely about the punishment bureaucracy, typically giving more than 100 lectures, speeches, interviews, and workshops per year, including training thousands of lawyers and judges.
Alec was awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award and the 2023 New Frontier award by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Other honors include the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South. His work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system in California along with his colleague Katherine Hubbard was honored with the Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Alec is interested in genuine holistic safety for everyone and ending human caging, surveillance, police, the death penalty, borders, war, and inequality. He also likes playing the piano and soccer, collecting rocks, singing, growing flowers, creating mosaics from dried flowers, repeating the same jokes until they become funny, writing bad poetry, and making weird paintings on large pieces of wood and metal.