OUR FACULTY

• Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty
• Visiting Faculty
• Special Faculty Appointments
• Pence Law Library Faculty
• Adjunct Faculty (Spring 2012)
• Adjunct Faculty (Fall 2011)
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Professor Roberts joined the faculty of American University, Washington College of Law after spending 2009-2010 as a Visiting Professor. She will teach in the Criminal Justice Clinic, as well as courses in criminal law and procedure, including one on plea bargaining. Her research focuses on the regulation of actors in the criminal justice system through constitutional law, statute, rules of professional responsibility, professional standards, and culture. She currently serves on the Board of the Clinical Legal Education Association, the nation's largest association of law teachers.

Previously, Prof. Roberts was a professor at Syracuse University, where she directed the Criminal Defense Clinic. Prior to that, she was a Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s Center for Research in Crime & Justice, and taught for three years in NYU’s Lawyering Program. She clerked in the Southern District of New York, and was a public defender in Manhattan.

Professor Roberts has written about the “collateral consequences rule” in the context of civil commitment of “sexually violent predators,” and about the link between ineffective assistance of counsel and restrictive discovery rules. Her most recent article, which Justice Stevens cited in Padilla v. Kentucky, explored the duty of defense counsel to warn clients about collateral consequences. Her work has also been cited in decisions from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the Southern District of NY, as well as in two petitions for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court. She recently co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the American Bar Association to the United States Supreme Court in Smith v. Cain, a case involving the failure to turn over exculpatory Brady material.

• Selected Publications

  • Jenny M. Roberts, Why Misdemeanors Matter, 45 UC Davis L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, Winter 2012).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, Margaret Colgate Love, & Cecelia Klingele, Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Law, Theory, & Practice (West Publications forthcoming 2012).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, Amicus brief to United States Supreme Court in Smith v. Cain, 2011 WL 3739380 (Aug. 19, 2011).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, Proving Prejudice, Post-Padilla, 54 How. L.J. 693 (2011).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, Ignorance is Effectively Bliss: Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions, Silence and Misinformation in the Guilty Plea Process, 95 Iowa L. Rev. 119 (2009).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, The Mythical Divide Between Collateral and Direct Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Involuntary Commitment of “Sexually Violent Predators, 93 Minn. L. Rev. 670 (2008).
  • Jenny M. Roberts, Little, Too Late: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, the Duty to Investigate, and Pretrial Discovery in Criminal Cases, 31 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1097 (2004).