Julia Simon-Kerr

Evangeline Starr Professor of Law

Education/Professional Certification

JD, Yale Law School
BA, Wesleyan University

Expertise

Evidence Law, Criminal Law, Literature & the Law, Law and Gender

Biography

Julia Simon-Kerr is the Evangeline Starr Professor of Law at UConn School of Law where she teaches Evidence, Civil Procedure and Law & Lying. Professor Simon-Kerr is a leading scholar of evidence. Her work on credibility and lying in the law, among other topics, lies at the intersection of evidence theory and critical legal perspectives, while also influencing reform. In her published work on credibility, she has explored how gender influences the types of evidence being used to impeach witnesses, how much of United States credibility doctrine rests on outmoded proxies for social worthiness, and how the law reflects deeply held societal conceptions of what makes people believable. Her current works-in-progress focus on the constitutional dimensions of demeanor as character evidence, evidence law and antisubordination, and interest capture in the federal evidence rulemaking process. She is also co-editing Critical Evidence, a book that will offer a seminal compilation of critical evidence scholarship.

Professor Simon-Kerr’s scholarship has been cited and relied on by multiple federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts, as well as being discussed in media outlets such as The Atlantic and National Public Radio. She is a co-chair of the Evidence Summer Workshop at Vanderbilt University, a founder and co-chair of the Prior Conviction Impeachment Reform Coalition, and she serves as the academic advisor to the Connecticut Code of Evidence Committee. Professor Simon-Kerr also has written on education law, gender and the law, and law and literature. Her paper Systemic Lying was selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. In 2021 she was the recipient of the Perry Zirkel ’76 Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Simon-Kerr received her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University where she won the Camp Prize for excellence in English literature. A 2008 graduate of Yale Law School, she joined the Law School faculty after two years as a Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Simon-Kerr clerked for Justice Jaynee LaVecchia of the New Jersey Supreme Court and Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.