Profile
Sonja B. Starr
Professor
Law School
Sonja B. Starr’s teaching and research focus is criminal law and criminal justice. Her research blends quantitative empirical work with more traditional legal scholarship. Topics include the use of predictive algorithms in sentencing and bail, racial and other disparities in prosecution and sentencing, and policies designed to expand employment opportunities for people with criminal records.
Her work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Stanford and Harvard Law Reviews. She is the 2020–21 Law and Economics Section Chair of the Association of American Law Schools, a past co-president of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and a board member of the American Law and Economics Association.
Starr holds a JD from Yale Law School, where she served as editor of the Yale Law Journal. She won the Yale Law Journal’s Michael Egger Prize for the best student Note or Comment on current social problems and the Ross Student Writing Contest sponsored by the ABA [American Bar Association] Journal Board of Editors. She clerked for Merrick Garland, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Judge Mohamed Shahabuddeen of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Most recently, she was the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.