Deborah Zalesne

Deborah Zalesne is a professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law where she teaches contract, corporate, and commercial law from a social justice perspective. She has published extensively in the areas of criminal justice, race and gender justice, solitary confinement, legal pedagogy, and issues relating to the use of contracts to empower disenfranchised groups. She co-wrote Teaching to Every Student: Explicitly Integrating Skills and Theory into the Contracts Class and she is a member of the author team for the fifth and sixth editions of the casebook Contracting Law, both published by Carolina Academic Press. She has authored/co-authored over 50 scholarly articles for legal publications such as the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the Columbia Journal of Race and the Law, and the Harvard Women’s Law Review, and her work has been cited as legal authority hundreds of times in law journals, books, and state and federal court opinions.

Deborah’s current scholarship focuses on the harms of solitary confinement. In 2025, she co-wrote Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement with incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell (Pluto Press). Chris and Deborah are currently co-editing a book entitled Dear Teenage Me: Voices from Beyond the Barbed Wire, that will include essays by incarcerated people in the form of letters to their younger selves. She is also co-writing a book (with Kwaneta Harris and Nathalie Martin) called Finding Oneself in Solitude, which provides mindfulness and yoga/meditation practices for people living in solitary confinement. With Chris, Deborah co-founded and runs a Writers Development Program that pairs aspiring incarcerated writers with inside and outside volunteer mentors who support their writing and help pitch it to media outlets.
​