Hopwood became well-known as a jailhouse lawyer who served time in prison for bank robbery.
[4] He was a high school basketball standout, earning himself a scholarship to Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska.
[2] The court, in a 9–0 decision, found that police had acted unconstitutionally in questioning Fellers, who had been convicted of a drug conspiracy.
[2] Hopwood has also helped inmates from Indiana, Michigan and Nebraska get sentence reductions of 3 to 10 years from lower courts.
[2] He also won honorable mention in the PEN American Center 2008 Prison Writing contest.
[11] In 2010, he was working at Cockle Printing in Omaha, Nebraska, a leading printer of Supreme Court briefs.
[2] Hopwood holds a Bachelor of Science from Bellevue University in Bellevue, Nebraska, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Washington School of Law, where he was a Gates Public Service Law Scholar.
He hired 2020 Georgetown Law graduate Tiffany Trump as his research assistant.
[21] Hopwood's memoir, Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption,[22] co-written with Dennis Burke, was published in August 2012.
[23][24][25] Hopwood is a criminal justice advocate, and he has written about the need for federal sentencing and prison reform.