Jennifer Laurin joined the faculty of the University of Texas School of Law in 2009. Professor Laurin studies and writes about how law and institutional design shape the functioning of criminal justice institutions. Her scholarship has considered, the role of constitutional litigation in regulating police, the shared roles of courts, police, and lawyers in regulating forensic science, and oversight of indigent defense. Professor Laurin is a co-author (with Michael Avery, David Rudovsky, and Karen Blum) of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation, the leading treatise in that area of civil rights litigation.
Professor Laurin is active in criminal justice law reform efforts. She currently serves as Reporter to the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards Task Force charged with updating the 1996 3rd Edition Discovery Standards, and she is the former Chair of the Texas Capital Punishment Assessment team, organized under the auspices of the American Bar Association.
Professor Laurin received her undergraduate degree in Politics from Earlham College. She earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was an Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review. She served as a law clerk to Judge Thomas Griesa of the Southern District of New York and Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and spent several years as a litigation associate with the New York City civil rights firm of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP (formerly Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, LLP).