Hannah Brenner Johnson
Hannah Brenner Johnson is Dean and Hiram H. Lesar Professor of Law at Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School. She is a legal scholar, author, and experienced academic and nonprofit leader.
As dean, Brenner Johnson has focused on increasing enrollment and improving the academic credentials of incoming students. She has recruited new faculty, and continues to build and strengthen the law school’s relationships with alumni and the communities it serves. She also launched Scholars in Conversation, a speaker series that strengthens the school’s scholarly culture by bringing leading voices into discussions of emerging legal questions.
As the only law school in southern Illinois, Simmons Law School plays a central role in addressing the region’s shortage of lawyers. Brenner Johnson advances that work in a myriad of ways, including service on the Illinois Judicial Conference Legal Deserts Task Force. She has expanded the school’s clinical program, creating opportunities for students to address the legal needs of individuals in the region while developing practical skills necessary to become competent lawyers.
Before joining Simmons Law School, Brenner Johnson was a tenured professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, where she served as vice dean for more than five years. There, she designed and implemented a part-time evening program, led robust faculty hiring initiatives, and guided the school through the COVID-19 pandemic, two dean transitions, and ABA reaccreditation. While on the faculty at Michigan State University College of Law, she oversaw the externship program and co-directed the Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession. Her earlier leadership roles include founding executive director of the Center for Women in Law at the University of Texas School of Law and the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and director of Women’s Leadership Programs at the University of Oklahoma’s Carl Albert Congressional Research & Studies Center.
Brenner Johnson’s scholarship examines how power operates within institutions and systems, with a focus on inequality in the legal profession. Her empirical study of media coverage of Supreme Court nominees won the 2012 AALS New Voices in Gender competition. That research led her to uncover the stories of nine highly qualified women who were shortlisted for the Court before Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment but never selected. With Renee Knake Jefferson, she told their stories in Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020), which received recognition for Exemplary Legal Writing of 2020 from the Green Bag Almanac. She is also co-author of Leadership, Law, and Pipelines to Power (West Academic, first edition 2019; second edition 2023), a casebook that grew out of a seminar she created.
A second area of her research examines how closed and quasi-closed institutions (like prisons, the military, immigration detention centers, and universities) respond to and address sexual violence. This work emerged from a National Science Foundation-funded study on which she served as co-principal investigator. The study explored the reporting of sexual abuse by incarcerated women through the class action lawsuit, Neal v. Michigan Department of Corrections. Findings appeared in peer-reviewed social science journals and law reviews, reflecting the interdisciplinary reach of her scholarship. Brenner Johnson was recently appointed by the governor to the Illinois Task Force for the Sexual Misconduct Climate Survey 2026-2027.
Her scholarship has been cited by the Delaware and Wisconsin Supreme Courts and in briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her work and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on CNN, which named one of her op-eds among 50 that told the story of 2020.
Brenner Johnson lives in Carbondale with her husband Mark. She earned her B.A. in American Studies and her J.D. from the University of Iowa.