Amy Bach

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Amy Bach is a lawyer and freelance journalist from New York City writing a nonfiction book about state criminal trial courts in the United States.

The book’s central notion is that in courtrooms across America, the injustices that play out are rarely a problem of one prosecutor, judge, or defense attorney flouting the law. Instead, the players operate in concert in ways that elude the common goal of justice. With her fellowship, Bach will take a journey through a number of courts. She will examine the financial arrangements among lawyers, judges, and local government and how these obligations affect justice. She will explore how the courts treat ordinary people and why, and she will highlight the structural and systemic reasons why justice fails.

Bach has secured a book contract with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. She is currently a Soros Justice Media Fellow at The Open Society Institute. Recently, she held the Hayward Burns Memorial Fellowship at The Nation Institute, where she wrote a series of articles about injustice for The Nation magazine. She is a graduate of Brown University and Stanford Law School.