USD Law Advocate, Spring 2026

FACULTY FOOTNOTES

That search has defined Brooks’s career as an academic and legal theorist. It has also informed his interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. The result is an intellectually rigor ous, curious and razor-sharp mind that has made him one of the country’s most respected voices on a range of social justice matters. However, Brooks views his career as a series of unantici pated encounters and a willingness to listen to advice. THE MAKING OF A MIND As far back as Brooks can remember, he was expected to be a lawyer. Growing up in a racially mixed, middle-class home in New Haven, Connecticut, he excelled as an undergrad at the University of Connecticut and planned to pursue a doctorate

at Harvard University in analytical philosophy—only to pivot to law school at Yale at the last minute. “Law school was this thing I had to get out of my system,” he said. Brooks had planned to attend Yale Law School for just one year and then begin his fellowship at Harvard. But one of his law professors intervened and suggested that he would make an excellent law professor. Another professor made the same suggestion. So “I was prepared to become a legal academic,” he explained. This meant serving on the law journal, clerk ing for a federal judge, working at a Wall Street law firm, and writing articles published at the Harvard International Law Journal and Cornell Law Review . Then, in 1979, USD Provost Sister Sally Furay visited his law office in New York City to suggest that he apply for a fac

ulty position at the law school. “I had never heard of USD; I had never been to California,” he stated. He agreed to fly out for an interview. The faculty responded with an offer. He ulti mately said yes, for the same reason so many others have been charmed by San Diego over the years. “It was February, and there was a blizzard back in New York,” he chuckled. “In San Diego, people were wearing flip-flops and shorts. I said, ‘I will give it a try.’” At USD, Brooks started by teaching and writing in the areas of corporations, cor porate finance and civil procedure, earning tenure after just two years. Then, at the urging of his former Yale law professor Boris Bittker, a leading tax law scholar who had also written one of the seminal books on Black reparations, Brooks switched his scholarly

Professor Roy. L Brooks with former students Pouch Liang ’23 (JD), MaryBeth Ammari ’25 (JD) and John “J.P.” Riley ’24 (JD).

To have students who are practicing, doing social justice work—that is the main benefit I see in my existence as a legal academic. These are people who have gone out and done things to make this a better world. ” —PROFESSOR ROY L. BROOKS

SPRING 2026

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