Alicia Bannon is Managing Director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. She leads the Center’s fair courts work, where she directs research, advocacy, and litigation to promote a fair and impartial judicial system. Ms. Bannon has authored several nationally-recognized reports and articles on judicial selection, access to justice, and government dysfunction, including Who Pays for Judicial Races? [2] (2017), Rethinking Judicial Selection in State Courts [3] (2016), and Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry [4] (2010). She was previously an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, where she taught the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic, and at Seton Hall Law School, where she taught a course in professional responsibility and legal ethics. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Bannon was a John J. Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons P.C. in Newark, N.J., where she engaged in a wide range of public interest litigation within New Jersey and nationally. Ms. Bannon was also previously a Liman Fellow and Counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program.

Ms. Bannon received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Comments Editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Student Director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. She clerked for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Kimba M. Wood in the Southern District of New York. She graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude with a degree in Social Studies. Prior to law school, she worked in Kenya and Uganda managing impact evaluations of education and health interventions, and at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.