Professor Adams’ research centers on race discrimination, school desegregation, affirmative action and housing law. She has published in the Yale Law Journal, the California Law Review, the Texas Law Review and other scholarly journals. Her work has also appeared in the popular media, including a recent piece in The New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act.

Professor Adams is working on a forthcoming book: The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. The Containment tells the story of the critical desegregation struggle that ended the Brown v. Board of Education era. The book will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Currently the Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, Professor Adams teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Federal Civil Rights Law and related courses. In 2017, she created Cardozo’s first real-time “pop up” course, The First 100 Days: The Trump Administration & The Rule of Law.  From 2010-2013, she served as a Board Member of the Innocence Project. Professor Adams was formerly a Professor of Law at the Seton Hall Law School, a Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Society Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit, and a Law Clerk for Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV of the Southern District of New York.

She has a B.A. in history from Brown University, a J.D. from City University of New York Law School and an LL.M. from the Harvard Law School, where she was honored as the first Charles Hamilton Houston Scholar.

Featured Scholarship

Equality of Opportunity and the Schoolhouse Gate
128 Yale Law Journal 2302 (2019) (with Derek Black)

Is Integration a Discriminatory Purpose?
96 Iowa Law Review 837 (2011)

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: Stifling the Potential of Grutter v. Bollinger
88 Boston University Law Review 937 (2008)

Radical Integration
94 California Law Review 261 (2006)

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