Amna A. Akbar

Amna A. Akbar joined Minnesota Law as the Benjamin N. Berger Professor in Criminal Law in the fall of 2025. Akbar is a scholar of contemporary social movements, policing, race, capitalism, and inequality. With a focus on protest and organizing, she is interested in understanding law as a dynamic terrain of social, economic, and political contestation, and in how institutions and discourses of law define and delimit possibilities of emancipation. She was most recently the Charles W. Ebersold & Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law.

Akbar's research has appeared in prestigious legal and social science journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, California Law Review, and NOMOS. She serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog and regularly writes for popular audiences in outlets like The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and N+1. 

In 2021, Akbar was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. She previously served as a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University and as a Visiting Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Law School's Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. During the 2023-24 academic year, she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law. She clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and worked as a staff attorney at Queens Legal Service Corp. She has served on the boards of many organizations, including Ohio Voice, Law for Black Lives, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Akbar earned a B.A. from Barnard College and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.