Alec Karakatsanis is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps. He has advanced constitutional civil rights cases that have not only challenged the size, power, profit, and every day brutality of the punishment bureaucracy in the US, but also done vital work that has led to the freeing of hundreds of thousands of people from jail, the return of tens of millions of dollars to indigent people and families, and the prevention of hundreds of thousands of illegal convictions. In close collaboration with directly impacted communities, his work has transformed the way, the US criminal punishment, bureaucracy, handles, fines, fees, and bail.
Karakatsanis graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Before founding. Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights, lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing in impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and cofounder of the organization Equal Justice Under Law. He is the author of two books, Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System (2019) and Copaganda: How Police and Media Manipulate Our News (2025). He regularly collaborate with visual artists, poets, filmmakers, and musicians to produce art about the punishment bureaucracy.
Thursday, 25 September • 4:30pm • Marsh Hall Auditorium (216) • Free and open to the public
This event is sponsored by the Undergraduate Student Senate and the Department of Political Science. For more information, contact Jules Boykoff, boykoff@pacificu.edu