In her comfort zone

Richmond Law professor Erin Collins’ previous position was challenging, to put it mildly. In one year, she and a team of seven recent graduates started a pop-up law office, researched and filed high-quality federal clemency petitions for review under President Obama’s administration in his last year in office, and then prepared to close up shop at the end of the year.

“It was kind of a crazy effort,” Collins said, “an extreme version of a law school clinic.” But the role of executive director of New York University School of Law’s Clemency Resource Center was a natural fit for the former criminal law attorney who had also worked as an assistant professor for NYU’s lawyering program. Her team filed almost 200 petitions for clemency — and had 83 granted.

One of the greatest rewards of her experience was coaching the new lawyers and recent graduates: “I taught them how to write the petitions,” she said. “I taught them the kind of sentencing law they needed to know. I was proud of the work we did.”

It was a love for teaching — and research — that drew Collins back to academia, and to her role at Richmond Law, starting in 2016. As an academic, her focus is on what she calls “grounded scholarship”: examining current criminal justice reforms, such as sentencing algorithms or specialized criminal courts, and their results. And as a professor, she brings that expertise through courses in evidence, sentencing law, and adjudication.

Collins’ fulfillment comes from “watching the students and helping [them] come to their own conclusions about the law, watching them work through the messiness of what law is.” In her new Crimmigration course, for example, students explore the intersection of immigration law, criminal law, and criminal procedure. “We throw them in there, and we work through the messiness together,” she said.

In the end, it’s the students who “push me to think differently about the law,” she added. “Together, we all learn something from each other.”