Jamelia N. Morgan

Jamelia N. Morgan’s teaching and current scholarship focus on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. Her research examines the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder, and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status. Morgan’s prior research projects have explored the ways in which political discourse over race-conscious remedies influence how antidiscrimination claims and remedies are conceptualized in court opinions involving voter discrimination and disability discrimination.

Prior to joining the faculty at UConn, Professor Morgan was a civil rights litigator at the Abolitionist Law Center and worked to improve prison conditions and end the use of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. In this role, she worked as part of the legal team to draft briefs that secured the removal of a client from solitary confinement after 24 years. From 2015 to 2017, Professor Morgan was an Arthur Liman Fellow with the ACLU National Prison Project, where she focused on the impact of prisons on individuals with physical disabilities and authored an ACLU report released in January 2017 titled, Caged In: Solitary Confinement’s Devastating Harm on Prisoners with Disabilities. Prior to her fellowship, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard W. Roberts of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Professor Morgan is a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, where she was an active member of the Criminal Defense Project and the Detention and Human Rights Clinic. During her summers in law school, she interned at the ACLU of Mississippi, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff and Abady, where she worked on employment discrimination, voting rights, and police misconduct cases. Prior to law school, she served as associate director of the African American Policy Forum, a social justice think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public discourse related to affirmative action, structural racism, and gender inequality. She is a 2006 graduate of Stanford University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Master of Arts degree in Sociology.

In addition to her academic appointments, Professor Morgan serves of counsel and as vice president and board member of the Abolitionist Law Center, board member for the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, and as a board member of Mary’s Daughter, LLC, a non-profit organization dedicated to meeting the needs of formerly incarcerated women of color. In June 2019, she was appointed a commissioner on the Permanent Commission on the Status of Hartford Women.


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