Hannah Brenner Johnson

Hannah Brenner Johnson is a law professor, author, and expert on issues related to law and gender. She has a proven track record as an academic administrator and nonprofit leader.

Her research sits at the complex intersection of law and gender. She studies institutions and systems (i.e., colleges/universities, prisons, the legal profession and the courts) and the disparate power dynamics that often exist within.

Brenner Johnson researches the perpetration of sexual violence, and the related reporting, investigation, and adjudication, in closed and quasi-closed institutional settings like prisons, the military, immigration detention centers, and institutions of higher education. Her initial interest in researching these systems stems from her involvement as a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded grant that explored the reporting of sexual violence by women in prison through analysis of the class-action lawsuit Neal v. Michigan Department of Corrections.

Brenner Johnson is an expert on issues of inequality in the legal profession. Her early work in this area considered, empirically, the ways in which the media portrays nominees to the United States Supreme Court, through a gendered lens. Her co-authored article that emerged from this research, “Rethinking Gender Equality in the Legal Profession's Pipeline to Power: A Study on Media Coverage of Supreme Court Nominees," was selected as a winner of the 2012 AALS New Voices in Gender paper competition. Her subsequent peer-reviewed essay, "Expanding the Pathways to Gender Equality in the Legal Profession," published in Legal Ethics, calls for innovative solutions to the rampant inequality that continues to plague women lawyers.

Building on this early work, Brenner Johnson has uncovered the stories of a cohort of nine women who were shortlisted, but never selected, to the United States Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to sit on the high court. Her co-authored book on this subject, Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, was first published by New York University Press in May 2020. The book was released in paperback in February 2022 with a new preface Shortlisted has received high praise from scholars and practitioners alike. Named 2020 Exemplary Legal Writing by the Green Bag Almanac, the book was described by the Library Journal as “An excellent contribution...and essential for anyone who values diversity.”

Brenner Johnson is also the co-author of two legal casebooks, Leadership, Law, and Pipelines to Power (West Academic, 2023) and Gender, Power, Law & Leadership (West Academic 2019). These one-of-a-kind texts grew out of a seminar she designed and taught over a decade ago.

Her work has been cited by the Delaware Supreme Court, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in briefs before the courts including the United States Supreme Court, by numerous scholars in law and other disciplines, as well as in popular media like CNN, Forbes, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and the Detroit Free Press.

Brenner Johnson teaches across the law school curriculum and her courses intersect many of her research interests. She has taught Torts, Gender, Power, Law & Leadership, Domestic Violence Law, Global Perspectives on Women in Law, and the Clinical Externship Seminar. She has previously taught undergraduate courses in both Political Science and Women’s Studies departments.

Brenner Johnson is a Professor of Law with tenure at California Western School of Law. She served as Vice Dean from 2019-2022 and 2023-present. Before joining the faculty at California Western, Brenner Johnson taught at Michigan State University College of Law, where she served as Director of externship programs, and co-director of the Frank J. Kelley Institute of Ethics. At Michigan State, she was also a core faculty member of the Center for Gender in the Global Context and a member of the Research Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. Before entering the legal academy as a professor, she served as the first executive director of the Center for Women in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, the Director of Women’s Leadership Programs at the University of Oklahoma Carl Albert Research & Studies Center, and the first executive director of the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

She earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa in American Studies and her JD from the University of Iowa College of Law.