Following her year of public service with the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC), Erin E. Murphy has returned to her faculty position at New York University School of Law. Murphy was recently interviewed by NYU Law on her experience at DPC, how the role influenced her teaching methods, and next career steps.
Excerpted from the interview:
At the DPC, which drives the development and implementation of the president’s domestic agenda across the federal government, Murphy worked on prominent issues that included policing, drug policy, access to justice, and alternatives to incarceration. In this interview, she looks back on her year serving in the Biden administration.
What did the day-to-day in your role at the White House look like?
Internal meetings, external meetings, quite a bit of research, both in the form of actual reading materials and in meetings with authors of those papers and stakeholders to say, “Is this [research] bearing out as true in your own lived experiences?” One of the great things about being at the White House is that you have this incredible power to have a meeting with pretty much anyone you want at any time. If you call someone to say, “I’m calling from the White House, and I'm interested in your paper,” or “I’m calling from the White House, and we want to know what your association thinks about this,” they say, “Great!” And the deep expertise of executive agencies can be tapped. The job is a lot of memo drafting and policy-honing based on research and communication. Then once a policy is set, there is a whole separate set of meetings to make sure it’s being implemented efficiently and faithfully.
Murphy served as Associate Reporter for Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Offenses. Her research focuses on technology and forensic evidence in the criminal justice system.