Recent from talks
James Forman Jr.
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
James Forman Jr.
James Forman Jr. (born James Robert Lumumba Forman; June 22, 1967) is an American legal scholar currently on leave from serving as the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and a co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in Washington, D.C.
In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Forman is the son of James Forman Sr. and Constancia Romilly, who met through their activism and involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Forman Sr. was the group's executive secretary handling internal operations from 1961 to 1966 and active during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Romilly, daughter of the British aristocrats and socialists Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly, dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to join the group in 1962 and would eventually become a coordinator of SNCC's Atlanta chapter. Forman has a brother, Chaka Forman. In the early 1970s, when Forman was seven years old, his parents, who had never been married, separated. Forman speculated in an interview that FBI pressure on civil rights groups at the time contributed to the strain on his parents' relationship: "There was also the period when...the FBI was putting incredible pressure on civil rights groups through the counter-intelligence program -- or the COINTELPRO program. And they were fomenting lies and distrust... They [Forman Sr. and Romilly] had a hard time in those years for a lot of reasons but I know, for my mom in particular, that that was one."
After his parents' separation, Forman and his brother lived with Romilly in New York but spent summers and holidays with Forman Sr., and Forman has stated that both parents were active in his life.
Forman was accepted into an elite New York high school: Hunter College High School. The school was almost all white, prompting Romilly to move with her sons to Atlanta so they could grow up in a black community, which she considered important for their racial identities. Forman expressed the importance of this move in an interview, saying: "In a city that has so many African-American people, I would go to school, and the jocks were black. The nerds were black... The artsy kids were black. The band-camp kids were black. The thugs were black -- like, everybody was black. So there wasn't a way to perform that went along with being black. And that, I think, was very powerful and liberating for me as a child because it meant I got to be who I was, which was a nerdy kid. And nobody thought, oh, well, you're not black if you're reading books."
Forman attended Roosevelt High School in Atlanta. He went on to attend Brown University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1988. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1992.
In the 1990s, right after graduating law school, Forman began work as a law clerk for William Norris of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The next year he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Forman describes working with O'Connor as enjoyable, although they disagreed on many of the social issues that came before the court. In his interview for the job, Forman was asked how his differing political viewpoints would affect his work as a law clerk. In an interview, he stated his response: "I told her that I will argue with you. I'll tell you the truth about what I think. I will try to persuade you. But at the end of the day, you are the justice, and I'm the law clerk. And if I'm taking this job, I'm agreeing to help you do your work, right? I'm helping -- if you decide to come out the other way and assign me the opinion, then I'll write the best opinion I can for you."
Hub AI
James Forman Jr. AI simulator
(@James Forman Jr._simulator)
James Forman Jr.
James Forman Jr. (born James Robert Lumumba Forman; June 22, 1967) is an American legal scholar currently on leave from serving as the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and a co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in Washington, D.C.
In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Forman is the son of James Forman Sr. and Constancia Romilly, who met through their activism and involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Forman Sr. was the group's executive secretary handling internal operations from 1961 to 1966 and active during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Romilly, daughter of the British aristocrats and socialists Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly, dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to join the group in 1962 and would eventually become a coordinator of SNCC's Atlanta chapter. Forman has a brother, Chaka Forman. In the early 1970s, when Forman was seven years old, his parents, who had never been married, separated. Forman speculated in an interview that FBI pressure on civil rights groups at the time contributed to the strain on his parents' relationship: "There was also the period when...the FBI was putting incredible pressure on civil rights groups through the counter-intelligence program -- or the COINTELPRO program. And they were fomenting lies and distrust... They [Forman Sr. and Romilly] had a hard time in those years for a lot of reasons but I know, for my mom in particular, that that was one."
After his parents' separation, Forman and his brother lived with Romilly in New York but spent summers and holidays with Forman Sr., and Forman has stated that both parents were active in his life.
Forman was accepted into an elite New York high school: Hunter College High School. The school was almost all white, prompting Romilly to move with her sons to Atlanta so they could grow up in a black community, which she considered important for their racial identities. Forman expressed the importance of this move in an interview, saying: "In a city that has so many African-American people, I would go to school, and the jocks were black. The nerds were black... The artsy kids were black. The band-camp kids were black. The thugs were black -- like, everybody was black. So there wasn't a way to perform that went along with being black. And that, I think, was very powerful and liberating for me as a child because it meant I got to be who I was, which was a nerdy kid. And nobody thought, oh, well, you're not black if you're reading books."
Forman attended Roosevelt High School in Atlanta. He went on to attend Brown University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1988. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1992.
In the 1990s, right after graduating law school, Forman began work as a law clerk for William Norris of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The next year he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Forman describes working with O'Connor as enjoyable, although they disagreed on many of the social issues that came before the court. In his interview for the job, Forman was asked how his differing political viewpoints would affect his work as a law clerk. In an interview, he stated his response: "I told her that I will argue with you. I'll tell you the truth about what I think. I will try to persuade you. But at the end of the day, you are the justice, and I'm the law clerk. And if I'm taking this job, I'm agreeing to help you do your work, right? I'm helping -- if you decide to come out the other way and assign me the opinion, then I'll write the best opinion I can for you."
Recent media