Professor Ngozi Okidegbe Receives the AALS Minority Groups Section 2024 Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award
Boston University Associate Professor of Law and Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences Ngozi Okidegbe has been awarded the prestigious Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award from the Association of American Law Schools Minority Groups Section. Established in honor of the late Derrick Bell, the first tenured African-American faculty member at Harvard Law School, this annual award recognizes a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching or scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice.
“The Bell Award is not only a recognition of its recipients’ accomplishments at that early stage of their careers; it is a note of promise from this AALS Section expressing its members’ belief that the recipient will go on to have a stellar career as an academic,” said Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law. “In Ngozi’s case, it’s spot on. She is a superstar and will continue to be one.”
Professor Okidegbe is Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development associate professor of law and an assistant professor of computing & data sciences—the first dual-appointed professor to the School of Law and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.
“This is a tremendous and well-deserved recognition,” said Azer Bestavros, Associate Provost for the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. “Ngozi is an exceptionally talented scholar and is a catalyst for activism, mentorship, and teaching at CDS and the School of Law.”
The author of scholarly work at the intersection of Law and Computing Technologies, including Discredited Data (2022), The Democratizing Potential of Algorithms? (2021), and When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms, and the Practice of Criminal Law (2020), Okidegbe’s research is in the areas of criminal procedure, evidence, technology, and racial justice. Her recent work explores the ways in which the use of predictive technologies in the criminal justice system impacts racially marginalized communities.
In the fall 2023, Prof. Okidegbe co-developed the Social Justice for Data Science Lecture Series with Allison McDonald, Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences. The four-part series brought together leading scholars in law, computer science, humanities, and social science to examine the current state of data science and social justice. The goal of the series was to engage with the relationship between justice (as a historically contingent and value-laden category) and data science (with a focus on datafication, automation, predictive analytics, and algorithmic decision-making).
Professor Okidegbe graduated with a B.C.L./LL.B from McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where she was awarded the Edwin Botsford Busteed Scholarship, the Rosa B. Gualtieri Prize, the Daniel Mettarlin Memorial Scholarship, and the Schull Yang Award. She subsequently earned her LL.M from Columbia Law School, where she graduated as a James Kent Scholar.
Okidegbe will formally receive her award in January at a special ceremony during the upcoming AALS 2024 meeting, at which point her name will be added to the website of the Minority Groups Section of the AALS.