Anthony C. Thompson helped bring a neglected part of criminal justice into the law-school classroom: the return home. At New York University, he developed a course focused on reentry after incarceration. Students examined the barriers people face when a sentence ends and worked on both individual representation and changes in public policy.
Thompson came to teaching with years of courtroom experience. He earned an education degree at Northwestern University and a law degree at Harvard, then spent nine years as a deputy public defender in Contra Costa County, California. His clients included adults accused of crimes and young people in juvenile proceedings. Before joining NYU, he also ran a private practice in Richmond, California, handling criminal, civil and entertainment matters.
The reentry course grew into what became NYU's Community Defense and Reentry Clinic. Its work combined courtroom advocacy with legislative and media advocacy. That approach asked students to consider the legal, social and political obstacles facing people after prison, along with the immediate demands of a client's case. NYU describes Thompson's original course as the country's first devoted to offender reentry.
His 2008 book, Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics, explored those questions beyond the clinic. Thompson examined how race and public policy shape reintegration, including the media's role in influencing policy. He also became the founding faculty director of NYU's Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law. A Perilous Path, published in 2018, brought him into conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch and Bryan Stevenson about race and the legal system.
Another strand of his work asks how lawyers prepare to run institutions. Thompson taught leadership and strategy through Duke Corporate Education as well as in legal education. In Dangerous Leaders: How and Why Lawyers Must Be Taught to Lead, published in 2018, he examined failures of leadership among people with legal training and argued for teaching those responsibilities more directly.
His edited volume Raising the Bar: Diversifying Big Law followed in 2019. It brought together lawyers of color to discuss life in major firms, including what firms can do to recruit, retain and promote them. The book also addressed the choices facing new lawyers, from finding mentors to building skills they can take into different jobs.
NYU now lists Thompson as a professor of clinical law emeritus. His reentry work follows people beyond the end of a court case, examining the obstacles they face when they return home.
