Hernandez D. Stroud is a senior fellow in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. An authority on prisons and jails, correctional oversight, and constitutional law, he researches the scope of the federal government’s power to fashion structural and systemic reforms that prevent and remedy the failure of state and local criminal justice institutions to observe the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He also drafts and spearheads federal criminal legal and policy reforms.
Stroud currently holds adjunct professorships at both Columbia University and NYU School of Law, teaching graduate, law, and medical students, and he is an affiliated fellow at Yale Law School.
Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Stroud was the inaugural recipient of the Robert F. Drinan Visiting Assistant Professorship at Boston College Law School, where he taught and wrote in the areas of constitutional law, civil rights, and statutory interpretation. He has also served as a visiting assistant professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law. Before his professorships, Stroud held an academic fellowship at Yale Law School, where he studied the legal implications of governmental responses to prenatal substance use and advised state and local governments on a range of criminal legal matters. While at Yale, he was also acting director of policy for Mayor Toni N. Harp of New Haven, Connecticut.
Stroud has been featured in national media outlets including USA Today, TIME, NPR, and C-SPAN. He is the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching, research, and policy, including selection to Forbes’ “30 Under 30.”
A first-generation college graduate, Stroud earned his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was president of the Student Government Association; his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania; and his law degree with honors from Washington and Lee University School of Law. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, Stroud worked as a full-time teacher at a public, all-boys high school in West Philadelphia by way of Teach for America. After law school, he clerked for Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
