Julia Simon-Kerr

Julia Simon-Kerr is an associate professor of law and the Ralph and Doris Hansmann Scholar.  She joined the Law School's faculty in 2012.  She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as the Executive Editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and her B.A. with honors in English from Wesleyan University, where she won the Camp Prize for excellence in English Literature and was elected Phi Beta Kappa.  Between college and law school, she wrote and edited children's books in New York.  While in law school she worked on women's rights issues in Argentina and at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.  After receiving her J.D., she served as a law clerk to Justice Jaynee LaVecchia of the New Jersey Supreme Court and Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. She began her law teaching career as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. 

Her scholarship focuses on questions raised by the truth-seeking function of the legal system and the mechanisms the system uses to assess credibility. She has also written on education law and law and literature.