Professor Robin Walker Sterling

Robin Walker Sterling is the Associate Dean for Clinical Education, the Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, and the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Before joining the Northwestern Law faculty, Professor Walker Sterling was the Ronald V. Yegge Clinical Co-Director and Associate Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she co-taught the Criminal Defense Clinic and the Immigration Law and Policy Clinic. In the 2017-2018 academic year, she served as a U.S. Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon. She is a graduate of Yale College and New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, and Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned an L.L.M. in Clinical Advocacy. 

Following law school, Professor Walker Sterling clerked for Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She then served as the Stuart-Stiller Teaching Fellow in the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellows program at Georgetown University Law Center, representing adults and children charged with criminal offenses in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and supervising third-year law students in the Juvenile Justice Clinic. Professor Walker Sterling then worked as a staff attorney in the trial division of the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia, representing adults and children charged with criminal and delinquency offenses. Professor Walker Sterling followed her tenure at PDS with a position as a Supervising Attorney at the Children’s Law Center, where she trained and supervised guardians ad litem handling dependency, adoption, and guardianship cases. Just before she joined the Denver Law faculty, Professor Walker Sterling worked as the Special Counsel with the National Juvenile Defender Center, a juvenile defense policy advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. Professor Walker Sterling’s research and teaching interests include clinical advocacy, critical race theory, criminal law and procedure, and juvenile justice.