Nina R. Morrison was appointed as a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York on August 11, 2022 and entered on duty on August 29, 2022.

Prior to her appointment, Judge Morrison spent twenty years as an attorney with the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit organization based in New York. While at the Innocence Project, Judge Morrison was lead or co-counsel for over thirty innocent people in more than a dozen states who were freed from prison or death sentences based on newly discovered evidence of innocence. Many of Judge Morrison’s cases also led to the identification and/or prosecution of the individual(s) responsible for the original crimes.

Judge Morrison has advised and trained prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges on DNA and other forms of forensic science in the courtroom; ensuring access to exculpatory evidence; and prosecutor-led reviews of wrongful convictions, among other topics. Judge Morrison also served as counsel on civil litigation matters seeking to vindicate the constitutional rights of the wrongly accused or convicted.

Judge Morrison is a former law clerk to the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also was an associate at the law firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.

Judge Morrison is the recipient of several awards for her public service work, including the NYU Alumni Changemaker award. In 2021, Judge Morrison was named an “Iconic Woman in Legal History” by the Texas Young Lawyers’ Association. She is currently one of two openly LGBTQ district judges in the Eastern District of New York.

Judge Morrison is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University, and a graduate of New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and graduated magna cum laude and Order of the Coif.