Roger Fairfax, Jr.

Roger A. Fairfax, Jr. is Dean and Professor of Law at the Howard University School of Law. Dean Fairfax’s scholarship is published in books and leading journals, and he teaches and conducts research on criminal law and procedure, professional responsibility and ethics, and civil rights legal history. He has championed diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts throughout higher education and the legal profession, and serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. Dean Fairfax previously served as the Dean of the American University Washington College of Law, and he is a member of the Association of American Law Schools Steering Committee leading the Deans of the nation’s 200 law schools. 

After clerking for Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Dean Fairfax served as an Attorney General Honors Program Trial Attorney in the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division. He then practiced at a large international law firm, where he handled corporate internal investigations, strategic counseling, complex trial and appellate litigation, white-collar criminal defense, and pro bono civil rights and indigent criminal defense cases.   

Dean Fairfax currently serves on a number of boards, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, Equal Justice Works, the ABA Criminal Justice magazine, and City Year DC, and he is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He previously served on the Judicial Conference of the United States advisory committee responsible for drafting the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Board of Governors of the National Bar Association, the board of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, the ABA Criminal Justice Section Council, the ACLU Awards Committee, and as a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.  

Dean Fairfax earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, a graduate degree from the University of London, and his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was an NAACP Legal Defense Fund Scholar, and an editor of both the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.