Michelle

Adams

Adams is the winner of the 2024 L. Hart Wright Teaching Award. She has published in The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and other scholarly journals. Her work also has appeared in the popular media, including a piece in The New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. In addition, she has appeared as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America.

Adams is working on a forthcoming book, The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It tells the story of the critical desegregation struggle that ended the Brown v. Board of Education era. 

Before joining Michigan Law, Adams was the co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. In 2017, she created Cardozo Law’s first real-time “pop up” course, The First 100 Days: The Trump Administration & The Rule of Law. From 2010 to 2013, she served as a board member of the Innocence Project. Most recently, Cardozo’s 2022 graduating class named her Professor of the Year.

Before joining the Cardozo faculty, Adams was a professor of law at Seton Hall University and a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit.