Shaun Ossei-Owusu is the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law for the 2026–27 academic year. He is a Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he teaches courses on criminal law, the legal profession, antidiscrimination law, the welfare state, and the business of law firms.
Ossei-Owusu’s scholarship examines the relationships between law, legal institutions, inequality, and the legal profession. Drawing on legal history, law and society scholarship, and doctrinal analysis, he examines how law both reflects and produces social conflict. His first book, Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System, was published by Norton in 2026. His second book, Many Hands for Justice: Legal Aid and the Making of America, will be published by Princeton University Press in spring 2027.
Ossei-Owusu has longstanding ties to the American Bar Foundation, having received the LSA/ABF Law and Social Science Dissertation and Mentoring Fellowship in 2010. The fellowship supported research at the foundation of Many Hands for Justice.