Susan Schmeiser

Professor Schmeiser teaches in the areas of family law, sexuality, gender and the law, health law, mental health law, and criminal law.  She began her law-teaching career as a visitor at the University of Connecticut School of Law and left briefly for American University’s Washington College of Law before returning to join UConn’s permanent faculty in 2005.  She received an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Brown University.  Along the way she taught seventh-grade Language Arts in Brooklyn, NY, and undergraduate courses in English and Modern Culture and Media at Brown and Women’s Studies at Yale.  Following law school, she clerked for the Federal District Court in Washington, DC, and worked as an associate for the law firm of Shea & Gardner.

Her scholarship addresses issues at the intersection of law and psychoanalysis, including the evidentiary status of psychotherapeutic material, the role of unconscious guilt in criminal behavior and punishment, and the problem of sexuality and self-control in mid-twentieth-century law and medicine.