Justin L. Brooks is a lawyer and PhD candidate in Government specializing in political philosophy at Harvard University. His scholarship sits at the intersection of criminal law, political theory, and Black intellectual and legal history. His research begins from the premise that racial domination is a structural rather than episodic feature of American constitutional democracy. Consequently, he investigates how the criminal legal system and the judicial apparatus sustain and reproduce racial hierarchy, while analyzing how marginalized communities cultivate strategies of political resistance and ethical struggle in response.

Justin's dissertation reconstructs the political and legal thought of Derrick A. Bell, Jr. The project departs from conventional readings that confine Bell to critical race theory and the legal realist tradition and establishes Bell as a canonical political theorist and existential ethicist of the American racial state. His work ultimately appraises whether and how advocates and marginalized communities should sustain moral agency without relying on teleological promises of democratic reform.

A recipient of the Harold Laski Fellowship and Presidential Scholarship at Harvard University, Justin was awarded the Christian Bay Award by the American Political Science Association in 2025. His public writing has appeared in The Appeal, The American Prospect, Truthout, and Slate. Additionally, he was featured in the A&E documentary Exposing Parchman (2023).

Justin served as a federal law clerk for the Honorable James E. Graves, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Jackson, Mississippi, and for the Honorable Eunice C. Lee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, New York.

Justin holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, an A.M. from Harvard University, and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Morehouse College. 

He lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.