About Alexandra Brodsky
Alexandra Brodsky is the Kazan Budd Staff Attorney at Public Justice. She litigates cases concerning civil rights abuses in schools and the criminal legal system with Public Justice’s Students’ Civil Rights Project and Debtors’ Prison Project.
Before joining Public Justice, Alexandra clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked to end discriminatory school push-out at the National Women’s Law Center, where she was a Skadden Fellow.
During and before law school, she served as a senior editor at Feministing.com and founding co-director of Know Your IX, a youth-led organization combatting gender violence in schools. For her work on sexual harassment, she received a Ms. Wonder Award from the Ms. Foundation and was named to POLITICO Magazine’s “50 Thinkers, Doers, and Visionaries” and Forward Magazine’s Forward 50.
Alexandra received her B.A. from Yale College and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she received the Charles G. Albom Prize for excellence in appellate advocacy and the Reinhardt Fellowship for public interest law.
Alexandra is the author of Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash and the co-editor, with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future.
She has written for publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Atlantic, the American Prospect, and Dissent.
She is also the author of A Tale of Two Title IXs: Title IX Reverse Discrimination Law and Its Trans-Substantive Implications for Civil Rights, U.C. Davis L. Rev.; Against Taking Rape “Seriously”: The Case Against Mandatory Referral Laws for Campus Gender Violence, 53 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 131, “Rape-Adjacent”: Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal, 32 Colum. J. Gender & L. 183, and A Rising Tide: Learning about Fair Process from Title IX, 66 J. Legal Educ. 822.
Where to find Alexandra Brodsky
Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash
A pathbreaking work for the next stage of the #MeToo movement, showing how institutions can address sexual harms with fairness to both victims and the accused
In the past few years, a remarkable number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions—some posed in good faith, some distinctly not—about the rights of the accused. The national conversation has grown polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests.
Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground. Drawing on the core principles of civil rights law, and the personal experiences of victims and the accused, Alexandra Brodsky details how schools, workplaces, and other institutions can—indeed, must—address sexual harassment in ways fair to all. She shows why sexual harm cannot be treated solely as a criminal matter, but require a response from the organization where the abuse occurred. She outlines the key principles of fair proceedings, in which both parties get to present their side of the story to unbiased decision-makers. And she explains how to resist the anti-feminist backlash, which hijacks the rhetoric of due process to protect male impunity.
Vivid and eye-opening, at once legally rigorous and profoundly empathetic, Sexual Justice clears up common misunderstandings about sexual harassment, traces the forgotten histories that underlie our current predicament, and illuminates the way to a more just world.