Professor Susan A. Bandes

Susan Anne Bandes is the Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at DePaul University College of Law. She is widely known as a scholar in the areas of federal jurisdiction, criminal procedure and civil rights, and more recently, as a pioneer in the emerging study of the role of emotion in law. Her legal career began in 1976 at the Illinois Office of the State Appellate Defender. In 1980, she became staff counsel for the Illinois A.C.L.U., where she litigated a broad spectrum of civil rights cases, and helped draft and secure passage of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. She joined the DePaul faculty in 1984, was named a distinguished research professor in 2003, and took emeritus status in 2018. Her articles appear in, among others, the Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Michigan and Southern California law reviews, as well as peer-reviewed journals including Law and Social Inquiry, Constitutional Commentary, and Law and Contemporary Problems. Her book on the role of emotion in law, The Passions of Law, was published by NYU Press in January 2000, and released in paperback in 2001. Bandes presents her work frequently at academic symposia and workshops, as well as to non-academic legal groups such as the American Constitution Society. She is a founder and current co-convenor of the Collaborative Research Network on Law and Emotion. Her recent pro bono activities include acting as co-reporter for the Constitution Projects bipartisan Death Penalty Initiative, which produced the report Mandatory Justice: Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty, and serving on the advisory board to the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justices study of the criminal justice system in Cook County, IL. She received her BA from State University of New York at Buffalo and JD from University of Michigan.