I. India Thusi

I. India Thusi is a lawyer and academic specializing in criminal law, especially as it relates to vice, police abolition, and critical race theory. She is currently a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington and serves on the Academics Committee of the American Bar Association Professional Development Division. She was a visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School in 2023-2024.

Career Thusi was born in Nigeria and moved to the United States at an early age. After graduation, she taught at Gorton for a year. She then enrolled at Fordham University School of Law, where she wrote a student note about criminal procedure for the Fordham Urban Law Journal. She then worked at the American Civil Liberties Union for a year, where she focused on the school-to-prison pipeline. After that, she clerked for Judge Damon Keith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She then clerked for Justice Johann van der Westhuizen at the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Following her clerkships, she enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she completed her PhD in Social Anthropology & Law and Society. Following her W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, she worked at the Opportunity Agenda for two years. In 2017, she was named to the faculty of California Western School of Law. She taught for one year at Widener University Delaware Law School, and currently teaches at Indiana University Bloomington, where she holds a joint appointment at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and the Kinsey Institute. In 2020 Thusi was named Top 40 Under 40 Emory University Alum. In 2024 The Law and Society Association awarded Thusi the John Hope Franklin Prize.