Professor Angi Porter joined the American University Washington College of Law in 2022. She was previously a Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and Adjunct Professor of Law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She teaches Torts, Higher Education Law, and Africana Legal Studies.

Prior to entering the academy, Professor Porter spent several years as a litigator at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where her practice centered on civil commercial litigation before federal and state courts and included work on health litigation, defamation, breach of contract, death penalty, asylum, housing, and criminal misdemeanor cases. She then worked as an Associate for the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action at the University of Minnesota, where she served on a team of attorneys investigating discrimination and sexual misconduct. Previously, she served as a federal judicial law clerk for the Honorable Michael J. Davis of the U.S. District Court of the District of Minnesota.

Professor Porter’s scholarly work is in Africana Legal Studies, the extension of Africana Studies methodology to legal study. In this groundbreaking research, she explores continental and diasporic African ways of knowing governance and examines how those ways of knowing persisted despite the imposition of Western law on African people achieved through enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression.

Professor Porter received her Juris Doctor degree from Howard University School of Law, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Law Journal. She earned her B.A. with high honors from Howard University, where she studied Communications and Africana Studies. She is former Vice President of the Minnesota Association of Black Lawyers, and she currently serves as Managing Editor of the Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.