Hannah Brenner Johnson | Simmons Law School | SIU

Hannah Brenner Johnson began her tenure as Dean and Professor of Law of the SIU Simmons Law School on July 1, 2025. She brings extensive leadership as both an academic and nonprofit leader and is a renowned legal scholar who studies issues of inequality in the legal profession, and disparate power dynamics that exist within institutions and systems.

Brenner Johnson has researched media coverage of Supreme Court nominees and subsequently uncovered a cohort of nine exceedingly qualified women who were shortlisted, but never selected, to the United States Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first. 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. Brenner Johnson is also the co-author of the legal casebook, Leadership, Law, and Pipelines to Power (West Academic, 2019 & 2023).  Brenner Johnson also studies the reporting, investigation, and adjudication of sexual violence that occurs in closed and quasi-closed institutional settings like prisons, the military, immigration detention centers, and institutions of higher education. She has served as a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant that explored the reporting of sexual violence by women in prison through analysis of a massive class action lawsuit (Neal v. Michigan Department of Corrections) brought against the state of Michigan by women who were abused in carceral settings. 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.

Before moving back home to Illinois, Brenner Johnson was a faculty member at California Western School of Law, serving as Vice Dean and Professor of Law from 2019-2022 and 2023-2025. She previously taught at Michigan State University College of Law, where she served as director of the externship program, 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.

A native of Elgin, Illinois, Brenner Johnson earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa in American Studies and her JD from the University of Iowa College of Law.