Zohra Ahmed

Zohra Ahmed writes and teaches about the US carceral state and US militarism. She examines how law and political economy shape the distribution of state violence, and studies the social movements that have risen up to challenge criminalization and militarization. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Fordham Law Review, and Michigan Law Review.

She started her legal career as public defender at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. While working in criminal court, she also founded a community court watching project. She entered the academy as a clinical teaching fellow at Cornell Law School, in its International Human Rights Clinic. With her colleagues and students, she represented individuals on death row in Tanzania and the United States and collaborated with groups in both countries challenging life and death sentences, focusing on the cases of incarcerated survivors of gender based violence. She also oversaw United Nations advocacy on behalf of the only human rights organization in the Occupied Syrian Golan. After Cornell, she joined the faculty at University of Georgia School of Law in the fall of 2021, where she taught Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law and a seminar titled Crime and Punishment.

She also serves as an advisor to the Community Justice Exchange, the home of the National Bail Fund Network, where she supports grassroots social movements challenging criminalization. She also regularly consults with criminal defense teams.

She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, her MPhil from the University of Cambridge and her JD from Fordham Law School.

She speaks French and Urdu, and has studied Mandarin.