Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Shaun Ossei-Owusu is a presidential assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. He has received awards from social science and humanities organizations such as the American Bar Foundation, American Society for Criminology, American Society for Legal History, The Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and the American Journal of Law & Medicine, among other outlets. His public writing has appeared in the ABA Journal, American Prospect, Boston Review, Jacobin, Public Books, and Salon. His book first project, The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, is under contract with Harvard University Press. His second project, tentatively titled Renegade at Law: How Our Legal Industry Creates, Justifies, and Compounds Inequality, is under contract with Liveright. Before joining the Penn Law faculty, he was an Academic Fellow and a Kellis E. Parker Teaching Fellow at Columbia Law School. He received his PhD from the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and his J.D. from Berkeley Law. He previously practiced litigation and healthcare enforcement law at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C., and worked as a Loaned Associate focusing on public benefits appeals with the Barbara McDowell Appellate Advocacy Project at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. He is a 2021 New America Fellow and a proud Bronx-born native.