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Faculty

At Northeastern Law, every faculty member is committed to public interest law and social justice. We invite you to read their profiles and find out more about their impact.

Faculty Co-Directors

Lucy Williams
Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration
[email protected]

Sharmila Murthy
Professor of Law and Public Policy and Faculty Co-Director, Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration
[email protected]

2025-2026 Faculty Fellows

The Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration (CPIAC) is pleased to host seven faculty fellows who will contribute research and scholarship in furtherance of CPIAC’s mission,  and in particular the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Project.

Since 2019, CPIAC has spearheaded the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Project, a collaboration among CPIAC; the College of Arts, Media and Design; Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities; and Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The project is building a holistic model of contributors to mass incarceration in Massachusetts in order to identify and validate policy interventions and provide a framework for other states, while also connecting stakeholders to facilitate identification of collective interest and scalable solutions.

Aliza Hochman Bloom
Assistant Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law

Aliza Hochman Bloom is an expert on criminal procedure, Fourth Amendment doctrine and criminal sentencing reform. Her research focuses on criminal procedure, particularly exploring various aspects of Fourth Amendment doctrine and its application. During her faculty fellowship term, Professor Hochman Bloom is studying various approaches to the application of the exclusionary rule in the revocation of probation and parole.

Erin Islo
Assistant Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law

Erin Islo is an expert on procedure, economic justice and the legal and philosophical contours of the family. Her work utilizes various methods to explore the civil litigation, the federal courts, and the regulation of family systems. During her fellowship, Professor Islo is studying the history and potential of centering children in policy-making that expands the social safety net. Courts, policymakers and scholars have focused on the family as a rights-bearing entity, subject to or shielded from government intervention, or as a social unit with internally competing interests requiring adjudication. Professor Islo argues that centering children as the beneficiaries of entitlements in a new, pluralistic legal framework for conceiving of the family is a powerful way to make clear the benefit of the ‘investment’ of entitlements, an avenue for swaying public opinion to support such entitlements, and to advance the critical socio-political project of cultivating the well-being of children, adults, families, and more broadly, society.

Associate Professor of Law and Business, Northeastern University School of Law

Professor Kelley's research explores how our domestic property law regime perpetuates racial inequality in housing markets despite purported attempts to achieve the opposite via antidiscrimination doctrine. These investigations bridge progressive property law approaches and critical theory frameworks. A key feature of his writing examining the intersections of race, class, place and property entails leveraging insights from fair housing jurisprudence, critical race theory and interdisciplinary analysis to identify oversights in conventional accounts of spatially determined opportunity.  As a faculty fellow, Professor Kelley will focus on excavating the nexus among neighborhood effects, mass incarceration and segregation to upend prison pipelines stemming from access to housing.

Daniel Medwed
University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University School of Law

During his fellowship with CPIAC, Professor Medwed will build on his scholarship on criminal justice. Specifically, working with the New England Innocence Project, his work will focus on a detailed analysis of exonerations in the New England states over the past 25 years. This research will inform a white paper, with recommendations for reform.

 

Gordana Rabrenovic
Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Gordana Rabrenovic  has more than thirty years of research experience in studying and researching social inequality and injustice on local, national and international levels. Her current research focuses on developing best practices for data-driven advocacy as well as envisioning a post-violent society using lessons learned from post-conflict societies. As a faculty fellow, her work will focus on the complicated relationship of law enforcement systems and foster care systems by addressing the under-examined impact of police interactions with youth in congregate care settings.

Dana Wright
Professor of Education, Mills College at Northeastern University

Dana Wright is a scholar of critical youth studies, research methodologies, participatory action research and urban educational policy. She is the author of Active Learning: Social Justice Education and Participatory Action Research and co-editor of Engaging Youth in Critical Arts Pedagogies and Creative Research for Social Justice. During her faculty fellowship with CPIAC, her research examines the complicated relationship between law enforcement systems and foster care systems, addressing the under-examined impact of police interactions with youth in congregate care settings.

Jonathan Zaff
Chair, Department of Applied Psychology; Professor, Bouvé College of Health Sciences

Dr. Jonathan Zaff is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses primarily on understanding how to create the conditions within which all children and youth thrive, particularly youth from backgrounds that have been historically oppressed. As a faculty fellow, he will conduct community-engaged applied research and evaluations utilizing data from the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

  • Aliza Hochman Bloom is an assistant professor of law and an expert on criminal procedure, Fourth Amendment doctrine and criminal sentencing reform. Her research focuses on criminal procedure, particularly exploring various aspects of Fourth Amendment doctrine and its application. During her faculty fellowship term, Professor Hochman Bloom is studying police enforcement of juvenile curfews.

  • Erin Islo is an expert on civil procedure, arbitration, algorithmic bias and economic justice. Her work utilizes philosophical, legal and empirical methods to explore the rights of consumers and workers and the civil and criminal regulation of the family. During her fellowship, Professor Islo is studying the use of automated and algorithmic decision-making tools that are utilized by states and counties in family intervention and regulation. Her research is the first and only comprehensive nationwide analysis of the use of algorithms in family policing and adds to a growing body of literature that critically engages with use of machine learning algorithms and their almost totally unregulated implementation by state and local governments.

     

     

  • 2022-2023 Faculty Fellows: Professor Stefanie Leahy and Professor Daniel Medwed. Their research and scholarship advanced CPIAC’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Project.

    Stevie Leahy
    Assistant Teaching Professor and Resident Fellow, Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration

    The Massachusetts Superior Court recently issued a decision that the prohibition on Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP) should extend beyond age 18. This is a developing area of law not only in the commonwealth, but nationally. Professor Leahy will lead two Legal Skills in Social Context projects furthering work to decrease juvenile incarceration and sentencing and further disrupt the cradle-to-prison pipeline — both with partners represented on CPIAC’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Advisory Board. This research will lead to creation of a bench card related to juvenile sentencing. She will additionally publish and present on her research in the Mercer Law Review Symposium Edition Prologue: Legal Narratives and the Law’s Potential for Justice and Injustice (forthcoming, 2023). Her article will highlight the way narrative is used (or ignored) in juvenile sentencing decisions and the myriad factors that impact an individual’s final outcome. Professor Leahy is further engaging students with the substantial relevance of her research by organizing “A Conversation with William Allen: Correcting a Fundamental Unfairness through the Clemency Process.” The event broughtt William Allen, a prominent recipient of a rare LWOP commutation, and his attorney, to Northeastern Law to discuss Allen’s experience.

    Professor Leahy’s research and scholarship in the current academic year builds upon her prior work as a CPIAC Faculty Fellow in 2021-2022, during which she presented for CPIAC at two conferences: The National Conference on Juvenile Justice (Pittsburgh, Penn.) and the Hampton Roads Social Justice Conference (Newport News, Va.). Throughout her fellowship, Professor Leahy’s contributions focused on, and engaged students in, tracking the impact of the Supreme Court ruling in Jones v. Mississippi and JLWOP sentencing, and additionally supported research by Citizens for Juvenile Justice, a partner in the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Project, into school-based arrests.Professor Leahy’s recent publication in the Northeastern Law Review Online Forum, “Clemency Hearing Raises the Question of Whether Massachusetts’ Courts are Ready to Extend the Prohibition on LWOP Sentences Beyond Eighteen,” expounds on her research related to the extension of sentencing limits beyond the bright line of 18 years.

    Daniel Medwed
    University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice

    Professor Medwed’s book, Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison, focuses on procedural barriers to freeing innocent prisoners, one of which concerns the parole process and the opaque and problematic criteria parole boards often use in making release decisions. During his fellowship with CPIAC, Professor Medwed will build on his scholarship on parole and probation. Specifically, his project will focus on how relatively minor transgressions can lead to a finding that someone has violated the conditions of their probation or parole and how that finding tends to result in imprisonment, adding to the problem of mass incarceration. This research will inform a white paper on these practices, with recommendations for reform.