Jocelyn Simonson writes and teaches about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and social change at Brooklyn Law School. Her scholarship explores ways in which the public participates in the criminal process and in the institutions of local governance that control policing and punishment. Her forthcoming book looks at bottom-up interventions in the criminal legal system, such as bail funds, copwatching, courtwatching, and participatory defense, asking how these real-life interventions should inform our conceptions of the design of criminal justice institutions, the discourse of constitutional rights, and the meaning of democratic justice.

Her most recent law review articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. Professor Simonson’s scholarship has been cited twice by the Supreme Court, and was designated “Must Read” by the NACDL Getting Scholarship Into Courts Project.

Prior to joining the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 2015, Professor Simonson was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law. Previously, she spent five years as a public defender with the Bronx Defenders.

Neil J. Young is a historian, writer, and podcaster, with a focus on modern American politics and culture. He is a contributing columnist for The Week, and writes frequently for leading publications, including the Washington Post, Atlantic, Los Angeles Times,Vox, Politico, Slate, and the New York Times. He formerly served as an opinion columnist for HuffPost. He is currently working on a book about the history of gay Republicans. 

Neil co-hosts and produces the popular history podcast, Past Present. Past Present’s episodes have been downloaded more than one million times, and the podcast was chosen by iTunes as a “New and Notable” selection when it launched in 2015. He is also the co-creator and co-producer of a limited podcast series from Pineapple Street Studios, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” about the history of the Chippendales. The series will debut in 2021. 
His first book, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford, 2015), explores the rise of the Religious Right and the challenges of building religious and political alliances among conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons.

Neil graduated from Duke University and has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and the author or editor of 17 books. He has been called “the intellectual father of the economic integration movement” in K-12 schooling and “arguably the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.” He writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and elsewhere and he has appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and NPR.

His first book, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School was published in 1992 by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book details the way in which idealistic liberal law students are turned to corporate law and was called “a forceful cri de coeur” by the Los Angeles Times. More recently, A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education (co-authored with Halley Potter), was published by Teachers College Press in 2014. The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action was published by Basic Books in 1996 and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post. Writing in the New York Times, William Julius Wilson called it “by far the most comprehensive and thoughtful account thus far for…affirmative action based on class.”

Rick Kahlenberg’s forthcoming book, The Walls We Don’t See: The Social Cost of Economic and Class Discrimination, looks at one of America’s most enduring systems of housing inequity – economic segregation – one that largely goes unremarked.

Elliott Morris is a data journalist at The Economist based in Washington, DC.  He writes mostly about American politics and elections, usually by engaging in a close study of political science, political polling and demographic data. He is responsible for many of the paper’s election forecasting models, including its 2020 US presidential election forecast. He also writes the paper’s “Checks and Balance” newsletter on US politics.

His forthcoming book, Strength in Numbers, is a look at polling:  its history, influence, successes, failures, and future — and an argument for why it is a crucial tool for a healthy democracy.

Elliott graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2018. He worked the Pew Research Center, and the election returns startup, Decision Desk HQ and joined The Economist in 2018  Broadly speaking, he is interested in ways to better understand the world using statistics, social science methods, data, and predictive models and is a firm believer in the power of public opinion polling to improve democratic outcomes.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and teacher, whose interests span the history of science, medicine, and the environment in the United States and the world and include a commitment to environmental and social justice. 

His most recent work explores the history and legacy of the Firestone Plantations Company in Liberia and is the subject of his forthcoming book, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia.

Mitman’s current research, for which he has received a €2.5 million European Research Council Advanced Grant, aims to discern the ecological, economic, political, and social forces at play that have simultaneously turned certain regions of West Africa into profitable sites of natural resource extraction, productive enclaves of biomedical research, and hot zones of pandemic threats.

Mitman is the founding director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, among others.