Professor Jamelia Morgan is an award-winning and acclaimed scholar and teacher focusing on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. Her scholarship and teaching examine 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.

Professor Morgan joins UCI Law from the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she was Associate Professor of Law. Professor Morgan has taught at Brooklyn Law School, NYU School of Law and Yale Law School. Prior to Prof. Morgan’s academic career, she was a civil rights litigator at the Abolitionist Law Center and worked to end the use of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Professor Morgan was also an Arthur Liman Fellow with the ACLU National Prison Project, where she focused on the impact of prisons on individuals with physical 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 received a B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Sociology from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School.

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.

Professor Morgan has also served as counsel, 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.