Chika Okafor

Professor Chika O. Okafor is an economist and legal scholar who studies how institutional rules and social relationships shape opportunity—from who hears about a job to who goes to prison to whose vote counts.  He originated the concept of “social network discrimination” in the Journal of Law & Economics, mathematically demonstrating that minority groups receive systematically fewer economic and social opportunities, all else being equal, simply because their social group is smaller.  A major implication of this finding is that it disproves the proposition that colorblind policies inherently promote individual merit: unequal opportunity can result from math without malice.  In the Journal of Public Economics, he shows that prison admissions and sentences rose in district attorney election years during the era of rising incarceration, suggesting that voter preferences shaped who went to prison.  His current work extends social network discrimination into new domains, including voting rights and redistricting after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais.  His research has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered; he has been interviewed on NPR-affiliate WBEZ's In the Loop and Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show; and his writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Slate, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Democracy Docket.  He teaches constitutional law, including the Fourteenth Amendment.

Professor Okafor joined the Northwestern Pritzker Law faculty in 2025. He also holds dual courtesy appointments in the Economics Department and the Kellogg School of Management, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.