Photo: Courtesy of SMU Dedman School of Law

Anna Offit is a legal scholar and cultural anthropologist with broad interests in prosecutorial ethics, the U.S. jury system, comparative law, and law and society. Her current research is on lay participation in the U.S. legal system. She teaches criminal law, evidence, and a research seminar on criminal jury reform.

Offit’s work has been published is or forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Washington Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review among other law review and peer-reviewed journals. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Lois Roth Foundation.

Offit is a graduate of Princeton University’s Anthropology PhD program, and received her JD from the Georgetown University Law Center where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics and as a law clerk at the Department of Justice’s Office for Civil Rights.

Prior to joining the faculty at SMU Dedman School of Law, Offit served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s Civil Jury Project. She was also the recipient of a Fulbright grant to study the abolition of Norway’s jury system, and a Graduate Prize Fellowship from the Princeton University Center for Human Values.

Offit is an active member of the Law & Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.