Susan Schmeiser

Professor of Law

Education/Professional Certification

JD, Yale Law School

Expertise

Mental Health Law, LGBT and Gender Issues, Family Law

Biography

Susan Schmeiser began her law teaching career as a visiting assistant professor at UConn Law from 2002-2004 and returned in 2005 after a year teaching at American University’s Washington College of Law. Since rejoining the faculty, she has taught in the areas of family law, sexuality, gender and the law, health law, mental health law, criminal law, and torts.

Professor Schmeiser, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Brown University, where she spent five years as a teaching assistant and advanced teaching fellow, and a JD from Yale Law School, focuses her scholarship on issues at the intersection of law and mental health, including the evidentiary status of psychotherapeutic material; the role of unconscious guilt in criminal behavior and punishment; the problem of sexuality and self-control in mid-twentieth-century law and medicine; and the challenges confronting mental health experts when prisoners who face the death penalty seek to halt their appeals and embrace execution. She has exhibited her unique interdisciplinary approach to the law as a presenter at numerous colleges and universities, including Johns Hopkins, Princeton University, Cardozo Law School, Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, USC Gould School of Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law, as well as at the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, the Law and Society Association, the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Law and Society, the American Society of Criminology, and the Modern Language Association. From 2010-2012 she served as associate dean for student life at UConn Law.

Prior to beginning her career as a legal academic, Professor Schmeiser clerked in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and worked as an associate at the DC firm of Shea & Gardner, which merged with Goodwin Procter in 2004. She served as a reporter for Connecticut Governor Dannell Malloy’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission.