Rakim Brooks

Rakim H. D. Brooks is the senior advisor and former president of Alliance for Justice and a public interest appellate lawyer. He is committed to a judiciary that reflects America’s diversity and the Constitution’s promise of a more perfect union.

Brooks garnered an outstanding reputation as an innovative strategist, policy thinker, and legal advocate in his previous role as Campaign Manager for the ACLU’s Systemic Equality Campaign. Prior to his work at the ACLU, Brooks was an associate attorney at Susman Godfrey.  There, he sued opioid manufacturers, worked to free citizens incarcerated in Dallas prisons at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and filed a Supreme Court amicus brief defending the right of consumers to have an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Brooks recently served as a member of the Biden-Harris transition team, after previously serving as a policy advisor for the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. He began his career as a C. Edwin Baker Fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, and currently serves on the advisory board for the Brown Center for Slavery and Justice and as a board member of Getting Out, Staying Out in his native East Harlem.

Brooks clerked for Justice Edwin Cameron on the Constitutional Court of South Africa and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit. He has an A.B. from Brown University; a M.Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a J.D. and M.B.A. from Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management.