Nicole Smith Futrell

Nicole Smith Futrell’s teaching, writing, and clinical practice center on criminal procedure, sentencing, reentry, legal ethics, and social inequity. She will join Columbia Law School as clinical professor of law on January 1, 2026, where she also serves as the founding director of a clinic focused on decarceration, reentry, and expanding opportunity and access for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.

Smith Futrell’s scholarship explores how organizing and advocacy on behalf of socially subordinated groups shape the rules, policies, and institutional practices of the criminal legal system. She has written and spoken extensively on the legal profession’s responsibility to address post-incarceration racial inequity, the role of prosecutorial conduct in wrongful convictions, and the intersections between systemic advocacy, professional ethics, and clinical pedagogy. Her work has been published in journals including the North Carolina Law Review, N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, and Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, among others. 

Prior to joining the Law School, Smith Futrell was a professor of law at CUNY School of Law, where she co-directed the Defenders Clinic and served as faculty director of the Center for Diversity in the Legal Profession and the W. Haywood Burns Chair in Human and Civil Rights Program. In 2022, she was awarded a Writing as Activism Fellowship by the NYC Literary Action Coalition and PEN America. She started her career as a staff attorney with The Bronx Defenders, where she currently serves as vice-chair of the board of directors.