Brence Pernell

Background

About Brence Pernell

Brence enjoys teaching legal writing and legal methods to law students at all levels. With adjunct posts at Columbia Law School, the NYU School of Law, and New York Law School, he's drawn on his background as a high school teacher to plan curricula aimed at developing law students’ writing abilities and other critical legal skills. Brence himself writes at the intersection of race, education, the law, and law school pedagogy. He has been published in the NYU Law Review, Villanova Law Review, and most recently, the Yale Law & Policy Review. His writing has also been featured in The Washington Post. Outside of writing and teaching, he continues to serve as the Associate General Counsel at MDRC, a social policy firm aimed at improving public education and the lives of poor people. After obtaining a degree in History from Duke University, Brence studied at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, earning his M.Ed. He taught high school for several years thereafter and went on to graduate from the NYU School of Law as both a Root-Tilden Kern Scholar and an AnBryce Scholar, and was a Ford Foundation Public Interest Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. An NYU Law Review editor, he won the writing prize for most outstanding Note for the Law Review in international, commercial, or public law. Brence clerked for two years after law school—at the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina (then Judge J. Michelle Childs, 2022 SCOTUS shortlist) and with the then Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Judge Theodore McKee)—before litigating at the law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He is based in New York City.