CCJ Directory

Brenda V. Smith is professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law and Director of the Community Economic Development Law Clinic. From 2018-2020, Smith served as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the law school. Smith has directed The Project on Addressing Prison Rape since 1998. In 1993, Smith was awarded the Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship and, in 1998, inducted into the D.C. Women’s Hall of Fame for her work on behalf of low-income women and children.

In November 2003, Smith was appointed to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission by the United States House of Representatives Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Relevant speaking engagements include the Convening on Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System in June 2016 at the White House, Testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights hearing in Women in Custody: Seeking Justice Behind Bars in 2019, and Testimony before the U.S. Department of Justice Review Panel on Prison Rape in 2020.

Prior to Smith’s faculty appointment at the Washington College of Law, she was the Senior Counsel for Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center and Director of the Center’s Women in Prison Project and Child and Family Support Project. Smith’s scholarly work and writing focuses on the intersections of gender, crime and sexuality. She is widely published and has received the Emmalee C. Godsey Research Award for her article Battering, Forgiveness and Redemption (2003) and the 2017 Pauline Ruyle Moore Scholar for Outstanding Scholarship Area of Public Law: Boys, Rape, and Masculinity: Reclaiming Boys’ Narratives of Sexual Violence in Custody (2015). Her most recent scholarship is Promise Amid Peril: PREA’s Efforts to Regulate An End To Prison Rape (2020).