Justin L. Brooks is a lawyer and writer based in Boston.  With roots in Mississippi and the Caribbean, Justin's academic interests are at the nexus of Black political thought and critical legal theory, broadly defined.  His first academic publication, "Juridical Occasions for Racial Formation: The Freedmen's Bureau, Labor, and Private Law," won the 2025 Christian Bay Award for the best paper on critical political science at the 2024 American Political Science Association annual meeting.  Justin's public essays on the criminal legal system, the institution of policing, and the United States Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence have appeared in The Appeal, American Prospect, Truthout, and Slate. 

In 2023, Justin was featured in Exposing Parchman, a documentary film that premiered on the A&E Network. Produced by Roc Nation, the three-hour investigative series explores ongoing efforts to reform Mississippi's carceral institutions. In 2024, Justin gave a talk at Harvard Law School's annual Critical Race Theory Conference that emphasized the importance of bridging critical race theory and black studies as the former looks towards the horizons of race & law scholarship. 

Justin is a former public defender for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Roxbury, MA, and a former judicial law clerk for the Hon. James E. Graves, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for the Hon. Eunice C. Lee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Justin earned his B.A. in Political Science, magna cum laude, from Morehouse College, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and A.M. in Government (Political Philosophy) from Harvard University.