The research and teaching of criminal law scholars at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law covers a wide range of academic disciplines, from social psychology to economics, along with topical issues such as the death penalty, pretrial detention, and jury behavior; and, in some cases, intersections with sociological characteristics such as race, gender, and disability status. Many of their research interests stem from earlier careers in law practice.
While none of the five professors at the Law School work directly together on research projects, their scholarship has a collective impact on students and on the broader field that is more than the sum of its parts, says Deborah Tuerkheimer, Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law.
“We all have different methodologies; we certainly have different research focuses,” she says. “With that said, all of us are deeply concerned with real-world problems and the ways in which criminal law and our criminal system can exacerbate those problems. And we have a proactive mindset, to not just identify what’s wrong, but to think about the way the law can be used to improve the lives of individuals who often really are harmed by the operation of the system.”
Associate Professor Stephanie Holmes Didwania says she was excited to join the Law School’s faculty in part due to their breadth of research.
“We all approach the topic a little bit differently,” she says. “I’m the only person teaching Criminal Law who is trained as an economist. We have a psychologist, an expert in feminist legal theory, a scholar of disability and policing, former prosecutors and defense attorneys, and experts in the fields of criminal procedure and evidence. … I wouldn’t have wanted to join a faculty where everyone else thinks the same way as I do. It’s helpful to be able to talk to different people about teaching and see how we have different perspectives in how we approach the topics.”
One of those different perspectives comes from Janice Nadler, Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law, who explores the intersection of law and social psychology, touching on themes like how judgments about criminal responsibility are colored by victim impact information and how law affects people’s behavior beyond the desire to avoid incarceration or other punishments.
A 25-year member of the Northwestern Pritzker Law faculty who received a law degree from University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in social psychology from University of Illinois, Nadler also serves as a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. “I use mostly experimental methods to test people’s intuitions about, chiefly, blame and punishment,” she says. “I compare and contrast those intuitions to processes of blame and punishment in criminal law and draw implications for legal doctrine and legal theory.”
A recent strand of research has focused on how the introduction of gruesome victim photographs into evidence influences criminal jurors. “We already know that makes them more likely to convict, but we’re trying to understand why—the mental processes involved,” she says. And she’s expanding that line of inquiry to include what are called “living victims” photographs, more common under state laws that require a picture of the victim while alive—for example, in a graduation cap and gown—to be introduced.
Nadler also has written about consent searches and exceptions to the need for a warrant, such as when an officer asks permission, and the person—in theory, free to say “no”—agrees. In past decisions, “The Supreme Court acts as if there are no power dynamics, coercion, or underlying fear,” she says. “I did a couple of articles exploring how unrealistic the court’s consent search jurisprudence is, given the basic principles of social psychology about the circumstances under which people do not feel fully free not to comply with requests.”
Having been a public defender in New York City, as well as a civil litigator for several years between law school and graduate school, Nadler had to understand jurors’ thought processes when she tried cases. She further explored how people think within the social context while pursuing her PhD.
“As a lawyer, I would think a lot about what aspects of the evidence and what arguments would make a juror more or less likely to convict in criminal cases. I wanted to understand those processes more deeply,” she says. “That training enabled me to combine my legal expertise to engage in research on these empirical questions about blame, punishment, and moral emotions.” All are topics on which she has published repeatedly.
Nadler teaches the first-year Criminal Law class, in which students learn the basic elements and philosophical grounding of criminal law and what it takes for the government, in any given case, to prove that an individual is liable for a criminal offense, including the link between conduct and harm, as well as the person’s mental state.
“I’ve found that moral character—our perceptions of the person accused, what kind of person they are, good or bad—and even small, minor character flaws can work backward and influence what we think about what the person is thinking.” This can shift a juror from thinking an act was accidental to something more intentional.
– JANICE NADLER
“Did they act intentionally, negligently, or recklessly?” she asks. “I’ve found that moral character—our perceptions of the person accused, what kind of person they are, good or bad—and even small, minor character flaws can work backward and influence what we think about what the person is thinking.” This can shift a juror from thinking an act was accidental to something more intentional, she adds.
The opportunity to try three cases before a jury during her public defender days gave Nadler a good grounding for her research and teaching. “There is nothing like that experience,” she says. “I feel lucky to have represented the many clients I represented as a public defender.
Professor Jamelia Morgan, who serves as director of the Center for Racial & Disability Justice at Northwestern Pritzker Law, focuses on the nexus between criminal law and punishment and race, gender, and disability, particularly the development of disability as a legal category. With a law degree from Yale University, Morgan taught at University of California, Irvine and University of Connecticut law schools before arriving at Northwestern Pritzker Law.
“I’m trying to understand the intricacies of criminalization, thinking about the intersection between policing, poverty, racism, and, in recent years, ableism, and how criminalization happens formally in the law and informally in policing,” she says.
Recently, she’s been looking at how the Fourth Amendment governs emergency psychiatric holds for purposes of stabilization and treatment. Another project focuses on whether the United States could be moving toward institutionalization in response to its homelessness crisis, as more states and local jurisdictions consider reforming their civil commitment laws.
“I’m studying those proposals, thinking about how the law might respond to them, again focused on policing practices that are currently embedded in our provision of emergency psychiatric care,” she says. “All of that together falls under the banner of the criminalization of disability,” using a broader definition that includes not only physical but also cognitive, intellectual, psychiatric, and mental health challenges.
Morgan developed those interests starting in a law school clinic that produced a research report focused on the conditions of death row in Connecticut. She and her fellow students discovered that 80 percent of the men they interviewed either had a disability diagnosis and/or a history of institutionalization. When they presented their findings, their professor realized a need to examine the disability law aspect.
Morgan volunteered and “ended up down a rabbit hole,” which accelerated when she took a disability law class the next semester. “It changed the trajectory of my life and supplemented the racial justice lens I had been equipped with,” she says, having grown up in Los Angeles in the 1990s. “I went to law school with a particular focus of using civil rights law on the criminal legal system,” she adds. “I had the racial justice lens. I didn’t have yet the disability law [perspective].”
After law school, Morgan spent about seven years in practice, first landing a fellowship at the ACLU National Prison Project, where she continued her work on disability law. She then went to the Abolitionist Law Center, where her job incorporated advocacy under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Then she began teaching. “Much of my research agenda does come about from my practice experience,” she says.
“This past semester, a student said to me, ‘It seems like it’s a good thing for the state to acknowledge a disability diagnosis, but it can also be the basis for surveillance and control.’ There’s kind of a duality with diagnosis. It’s not all good or bad. It depends on the context. It’s an incredibly amazing thing to be able to talk to really smart law students through the doctrine we’re learning and be able to use their questions as a basis for spinning out future projects.”
– JAMELIA MORGAN
At Northwestern Pritzker Law, Morgan teaches Criminal Law, Disability Law, and a Critical Race Theory seminar. “I find that it is incredibly generative to teach,” she says. “This past semester, a student said to me, ‘It seems like it’s a good thing for the state to acknowledge a disability diagnosis, but it can also be the basis for surveillance and control.’ There’s kind of a duality with diagnosis. It’s not all good or bad. It depends on the context. It’s an incredibly amazing thing to be able to talk to really smart law students through the doctrine we’re learning and be able to use their questions as a basis for spinning out future projects.”
At the Center for Racial & Disability Justice, an academic research center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Morgan and her full-time team of four, along with student fellows, bring her research ideas into practice. “We bring research ideas to communities grappling with these questions, policymakers, and other nonprofit organizations dedicated to racial and disability justice,” she says. “We’ve been able to have a set of conversations with various levels of government, various stakeholders. We have a lot of resources there trying to bring questions to the fore and reframe debates.”
Intellectually and practically adjacent to Morgan’s advocacy for disability rights, senior lecturer Meredith Martin Rountree focuses in part on how people with mental illness are treated in the criminal justice system. A former death penalty defense lawyer with a JD from Georgetown Law and a PhD from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, she founded the Texas ACLU’s prison and jail project and also taught law school at UT, where she helped found the school’s Capital Punishment Center and co-directed its Capital Punishment Clinic.
Rountree’s most current research, in collaboration with Mary Rose at UT-Austin, a scholar of juries, focuses on juries in federal capital cases because, she says, jury forms in state-level cases provide less insight into jury decision-making. “Federal forms can be 50 pages long, and jurors are voting on multiple items involving aggravating and mitigating circumstances,” Rountree says. “We get a remarkable picture of what the jury was valuing in reaching their decision.”
They have created a database and published papers on what jurors most often care about in making death row determinations, and they’re currently examining the differences in geographic clusters, contrasting those in the New Orleans–based Fifth Circuit, where jurors have tended to be less receptive to mitigating evidence, with those in the Eighth Circuit, based in St. Louis. “We are trying to understand why [this geographic contrast exists]—are the jurors different, or the lawyers, or the judges?” she says.
Rountree’s research interests stem from her death penalty defense work. That seed was planted during her few years as a civil litigator, where she worked on a death penalty retrial with her boss, then flowered after she moved to an organization called the Texas Resource Center. She handled some death penalty-related work in subsequent practice settings in Seattle and after moving back to Texas, where she started a small law firm and became involved with the UT Capital Punishment Clinic.
After about 15 years in practice, “I decided I was curious to think about the death penalty and prisons in a larger context and went to graduate school and got a PhD,” she says. Her dissertation focused on people on death row who requested to be executed, and Rountree has turned that work into a series of journal articles.
“There’s a lot of theories about why people do that,” she says. “One is that they are mentally ill. Another is that given prison conditions, people can’t bear to keep living on death row. … What distinguished [those asking to be executed] from other death-sentenced prisoners is not that they were more likely to have mental illness, but that they were more likely to have a history of depression and suicide ideation. They also tended to express their desire to be executed early, before they even reached death row.”
“Jurors tell us this evidence is really important to them—[such as] evidence about the execution’s impact on loved ones. That means as much to them about the biographical information as to why this person shouldn’t be sentenced to death,”
– MEREDITH MARTIN ROUNTREE
Another article of Rountree’s intervenes in current debates regarding whether certain arguably mitigating evidence should be admitted and presented to jurors. “Jurors tell us this evidence is really important to them—[such as] evidence about the execution’s impact on loved ones,” she says. How prison conditions can sometimes lead to inmate homicides is another facet that’s sometimes kept from jurors, and Rountree’s and Rose’s research demonstrates “that means as much to them about the biographical information as to why this person shouldn’t be sentenced to death,” she adds.
In the classroom, Rountree teaches mostly criminal courses, and her research most neatly dovetails with Criminal Process, which covers criminal case adjudication. This semester she’s teaching a class on mental health in the law, and she expects to teach a death penalty related class next school year. Outside of Northwestern Pritzker Law, she is a member of the American Bar Association (ABA) Death Penalty Due Process Review Project, which seeks through research and education “to promote fairness and accuracy in death penalty systems.”
An 11-year veteran of Northwestern Pritzker Law, Tuerkheimer previously taught at DePaul University and University of Maine law schools and has a JD from Yale University. She teaches and writes about criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. She has authored the books, CREDIBLE: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers (HarperCollins, 2021) and Flawed Convictions: Shared Baby Syndrome and the Inertia of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2014).
After law school, Tuerkheimer spent five years as an assistant district attorney in New York County specializing in domestic violence prosecution, and her research has grown out of that practice. “What brought me to prosecution was the desire to work with victims of this particular kind of crime,” she says. In her research, “I focus on domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual misconduct, and I’ve done some work in child abuse as well, and the intersections [among them]—thinking about the ways the legal system does and does not respond to these crimes against, particularly, vulnerable [and] marginalized populations.”
In Tuerkheimer’s experience, there are both legal and cultural gaps in the response to gender violence. “I see gender violence as an essential component of gender subordination,” she says. “Gender justice hinges on the ways that we handle and respond to this type of crime and misconduct.”
“We can predict, as a general proposition, how someone is going to be perceived when they either make an allegation of abuse or deny an allegation of abuse,” she says. “Credibility judgments map onto power differentials in our society.”
– DEBORAH TUERKHEIMER
The book CREDIBLE expands on arguments she has made in law review articles and attempts to bring them to a wider audience. “I’ve continued to spend time since the publication speaking about it to different kinds of audiences and working on the arguments that I make in the book, which are really focused on this question of credibility—credibility of accusers, when they come forward to allege some kind of sexual misconduct,” she says. “It has resonated with people from all walks of life in ways that have been really gratifying.”
The book situates credibility in the context of structural inequalities, Tuerkheimer says, viewing determinations by (for example) jurors not as random, idiosyncratic outcomes, but tied to societal hierarchies. “We can predict, as a general proposition, how someone is going to be perceived when they either make an allegation of abuse or deny an allegation of abuse,” she says. “Credibility judgments map onto power differentials in our society.”
CREDIBLE also challenges readers to think more critically about who was to blame—the perpetrator and not the victim, Tuerkheimer says. “And also, that the abuse matters,” she says. “Blaming the victim and not caring about the abuse are often ways we discount credibility, yet we often don’t see that.”
Tuerkheimer teaches Feminist Jurisprudence, Reproductive Justice, Criminal Law, and Evidence. As someone who worked with victims as a prosecutor and spoke with survivors of sexual violence while researching her book, she brings a focus on practical implications of the law into the classroom.
“I’m so aware that the cases we read in law school are really stories of people who have been impacted,” she says. “That’s true not just of victims, but of defendants. … That perspective is an important one for students to have as they go through law school and risk becoming too clinical, too detached, when they read these cases.”
Some of Tuerkheimer’s research and teaching also touches on reproductive rights. “Between the #MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the work that I do has felt more urgent in recent years,” she says. “That is very motivating and brings home that what we do in the academy can be incredibly timely and impactful.”
Didwania writes and teaches about criminal law and criminal procedure, focused on how prosecutors exercise discretion and pretrial detention. With a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD in managerial economics and strategy from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Didwania taught for two years each at the University of Wisconsin and Temple University law schools before joining Northwestern Pritzker Law.
Although Didwania enjoyed her earlier career stops, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to return to her hometown and alma mater, especially with a faculty so interdisciplinary. “I felt like I won the lottery when I got this job,” she enthuses.
Didwania uses economics methods to understand how aspects of the federal criminal system operate, and she’s taken both causal and descriptive approaches using big data in her research. She’s long been interested in prosecutorial decision-making, and after reading “fascinating literature about decision-making by judges” as a law student, she wondered why there wasn’t much similar research into prosecutors.
“Some of my work examines prosecutorial decision-making both in terms of biases that might affect prosecutors when deciding how to charge defendants in criminal cases, and also in terms of how prosecutors might respond when a person in charge, like the Attorney General, instructs them to do something,” she says.
Federal pretrial detention, another area of interest, dovetails with a movement around the country to reform the system—notably, Illinois’ move to end cash bail. This mirrors the longtime practice of the federal court system, which nonetheless has extremely high pretrial detention rates, Didwania says.
“Being held in pretrial detention leads to worse case outcomes,” she says. “I suggest that that’s because when a defendant is in detention, it’s harder to meet with a lawyer, participate with the case, and build a stronger mitigation [case] for themselves.”
– STEPHANIE HOLMES DIDWANIA
“Being held in pretrial detention leads to worse case outcomes,” she says. “I suggest that that’s because when a defendant is in detention, it’s harder to meet with a lawyer, participate with the case, and build a stronger mitigation [case] for themselves. Also, when the defendant is held in detention, it’s sometimes harder for them to cooperate with the government in another prosecution, which is an important way to reduce their sentence.”
The origins of Didwania’s research interests came while working in a law school clinic that represented defendants charged with federal felonies in Chicago. While obtaining her PhD, she started to write about some of the other issues, and “every project came from a different, initial spark, that led me to say, ‘This is interesting,’” she says. “Everything comes from a new place, but the origin of my research interest came from my clinical experience, and then getting my PhD and wanting to use the tools of economics to answer questions I was interested in.”
In the classroom, Didwania mostly teaches Criminal Law, required for 1Ls, and Constitutional Criminal Procedure, an elective for second- and third-year students. What she’s learned affects how she teaches in terms of bringing social science research into the classroom. For example, when teaching about traffic stops during her Criminal Procedure class, she ensures students understand the mechanics of the law, but also know about lawsuits related to racial inequalities in divergent rates at which people are stopped.
“We spend a lot of the class learning: this is when the police are allowed to stop you and not allowed. This is when they’re allowed to search a car, or frisk you, or not,” she says. “Then we spend time talking about the social science research. I tell students that if you’re interested in a [research] project, there’s a ton of data out there.”
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