Criminal Law Professor

Criminal law is typically a first-year course covering the foundational doctrine of criminal liability—actus reus, mens rea, defenses, and the structure of specific crimes. Teaching it well means helping students understand both the doctrine and the underlying questions of punishment, culpability, and state power that animate it. The material tends to provoke strong emotional responses.

The scholarly agenda in criminal law tends to engage with policy and justice in ways that are hard to avoid. Criminal law scholarship intersects with mass incarceration, racial disparities, prosecutorial power, and victim rights—areas where empirical research and normative analysis often converge. Whether you engage with those debates or focus on doctrinal analysis is a real scholarly choice.

People who tend to thrive find both the doctrine and the policy dimensions genuinely compelling. If you're interested in criminal procedure as well as substantive criminal law, you'll have natural overlap with the 1L curriculum and upper-level courses. The emotional intensity of the subject matter—homicides, sexual assault, prosecutorial misconduct—requires a certain groundedness to teach repeatedly and effectively over a career.