Criminal Justice Reform: Proposals and Perspectives
Northwestern Student Chapter
Online Zoom Event
Chicago, IL 60611
John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law
Professor Allen is the John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law at Northwestern University, in Chicago, IL. He did his undergraduate work in mathematics at Marshall University and studied law at the University of Michigan. He is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of evidence, procedure, and constitutional law. He has published five books and approximately eighty articles in major law reviews. The New York Times referred to him as one of nation's leading experts on evidence and procedure. He has been quoted in national news outlets hundreds of times, and appears regularly on national broadcast media on matters ranging from complex litigation to constitutional law to criminal justice.
Professor Allen began his career at the State University of New York, and has held professorships at the University of Iowa and Duke University prior to coming to Northwestern. He has lectured on his research at distinguished universities across the world, among them Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Duke University, Oxford University, University of London, Leiden University, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Edinburgh, University of British Columbia, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), Parma University, Turin University, Pavia University, University of Adelaide, Australia, and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and UNAM, Mexico City. In 1991, he was the University Distinguished Visiting Scholar, at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. One of his books has been translated into Chinese by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and he has been invited to China for a series of lectures in the summer of 2004 and the spring of 2005. He has also been invited to lecture by the governments of Mexico and Trinidad/Tobago. For the last ten years, his research has focused on the nature of juridical proof. He has been involved as a consultant on numerous cases involving complex litigation in the United States and abroad.
He is a member of the American Law Institute, has chaired the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and was Vice-chair of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence Committee of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section. He has served as a Commissioner of the Illinois Supreme Court, assigned to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. He is presently on the Boards of the Constitutional Rights Foundation-Chicago, and the Yeager Society of Scholars of Marshall University. He is, or has served, on various boards and committees of civic and cultural institutions in Chicago.
Professor, University of Utah College of Law
Professor Baughman's teaching and scholarship focus on criminal law, criminal procedure, and international law. Shima Baradaran Baughman is a national expert on bail and pretrial prediction and her current scholarship examines criminal justice policy, prosecutors, drugs, search and seizure, international law and terrorism, and race and violent crime. Baughman has worked with economists and political scientists to write articles involving advanced empirical modeling and randomized controlled trials, including the largest global field experiment in the world. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, on National Public Radio, the Economist, the Washington Post, Forbes and other media outlets and she has been invited to present her work at Stanford, Cornell, NYU, UCLA and many other law schools and to groups of judges and attorneys across the country. Her articles have been published in many top journals including University of Pennsylvania Law Review, USC Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. She recently published a book, The Bail Book: A Comprehensive Look at Bail in America's Criminal Justice System with Cambridge University Press. Her textbook, Criminal Law: Case Studies and Controversies (4th Ed Aspen), coauthored with Paul Robinson and Michael Cahill is now available.
Voted Professor of the year in 2013, she joined the faculty of the University of Utah after three years of teaching at BYU Law School. She served as Chair of the AALS Criminal Justice Section Executive Committee in 2015-16. Baradaran also has chaired the ABA Pretrial Justice Taskforce and as Co-chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention, Pretrial Release & Police Practices. Professor Baughman was appointed in 2014 as a member of the Utah Sentencing Commission.
Before joining the legal academy, Professor Baughman served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar researching pretrial detention in Malawi and lecturing in criminal law at the University of Malawi. While in Malawi she worked as a justice advisor to the British Department for International Development, advised a coalition of international nongovernmental organizations including UNAIDS and UNDP, and represented criminal defendants in felony cases and in constitutional litigation.
Professor Baughman has worked as a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York, receiving national press for role in prison reform litigation. After graduating first in her class at Brigham Young University Law School and serving as editor-in-chief of the BYU Law Review, Shima Baradaran Baughman clerked for Judge Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.