Caren Morrison

Caren Myers Morrison, professor of law, teaches evidence, criminal procedure, and law & literature. She served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 2001 to 2006, where she prosecuted international narcotics traffickers and organized crime. Her research focuses on police violence, domestic homicide, and the place of women in the common law.

Morrison’s most recent article, “The State Courts Don't Have Time for Your Crackpot Antiquarianism: A Decade of Domestic Homicides since Giles v. California," published in the Cornell Law Review, examines 114 cases of domestic homicide after the new Giles standard signaled that most victim’s words would be excluded from trial. The article argues that the suspicion with which courts have treated dead victims’ statements dovetails with myths about female conniving that have purchase to this day. Her previous articles have explored the semiotics of police video, moral injury and the police, the impact of the Internet on the functioning of the jury, and proposed ways of improving peremptory strikes in jury selection. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the California Law Review Circuit, and the Columbia Law Review Sidebar.

Morrison graduated from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent Scholar (1996-97), a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar (1994-96), and a notes editor of the Columbia Law Review. After graduation, she clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Eugene H. Nickerson of the Eastern District of New York and Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. From 2006 to 2009, she was acting assistant professor at New York University School of Law. Before law school, Morrison trained as a journalist at London’s City University and worked as freelance journalist in London for seven years.