Dean Renée Hutchins Laurent
Baltimore, MD
University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law
Spelman College, B.A., Mathematics
Yale Law School, J.D.
Professor Hutchins joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and founded the Appellate and Post-Conviction Advocacy Clinic in 2004.
Through the Appellate and Post-Conviction Advocacy Clinic, Professor Hutchins maintains an active criminal defense appellate practice, including obtaining conditional commutations of clients’ sentences from Maryland’s Governor and representing defendants on cases involving issues of first impression in the Maryland courts. In addition, Professor Hutchins supervises law students who research and draft briefs as well as present oral arguments in their representation of clients who appeal their criminal convictions in Maryland state courts.
Prior to joining the faculty in 2004, Professor Hutchins served as a federal prosecutor with the Tax Division of the United States Department of Justice, and as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia.
She also practiced as a criminal defense attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City, where she represented clients in the appeal of their criminal convictions. In addition, Professor Hutchins served as a faculty member in NYU School of Law’s Lawyering Program. She clerked for the Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
She teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure, appellate and trial advocacy, and criminal policy. Professor Hutchins’ particular interests are the intersection of constitutional law with social science, and the practical implementation of dimensions of policing, adjudicative processes, and privacy. Her scholarly work had been published in the UCLA Law Review, the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, and the Search and Seizure Law Report, among others.
Professor Hutchins’ most recent articles are You Can’t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility and When Enough Is Enough: Location Tracking, Machine Learning and the Mosaic Theory. She has written two books Learning Criminal Procedure (West Academic 2014) and Developing Professional Skills: Criminal Procedure (West Academic 2017). She is the contributor to a third book, Policing the Black Man (Penguin Random House 2017).
Professor Hutchins received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Chair of the Moot Court Board of Directors, and her B.A., cum laude, in Mathematics from Spelman College.
