Professor JaneAnne Murray Voted to Receive Promotion to Clinical Professor of Law

The University of Minnesota Law School faculty has recommended Professor JaneAnne Murray for promotion to clinical professor of law, pending approval by the University of Minnesota Board of Regents. Murray is the faculty director of the Clemency Project Clinic. She specializes in criminal law and government investigations, and teaches criminal procedure and sentencing advocacy. Her research interests include plea bargaining, prosecutorial discretion, and sentencing. 

In 2014, Murray became a member of the steering committee of Clemency Project 2014, a joint initiative of the ABA, the NACDL, FAMM, the ACLU, and the Federal Defenders to recruit and train volunteer lawyers to represent eligible applicants for the Obama administration’s clemency program for nonviolent federal inmates. Complementing that role, she established a clemency project at the Law School in the fall of 2014, and, with the assistance of Professor June Carbone, supervised 15 students who drafted 35 petitions for eligible inmates. Fourteen of these inmates received grants of clemency (a 15th received compassionate release, an application also supported by the Law School’s Clemency project).

Murray received her B.C.L. degree from University College Cork and her LL.M. degree from the University of Cambridge, both with first-class honors. After law school, she worked in New York as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; a trial attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York in Manhattan; an assistant federal public defender in the Eastern District of New York; and a litigation counsel at O’Melveny & Myers, before opening her own practice focused on criminal defense. From 1999 to 2000, she was the International Advisor for the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights in Kampot, Cambodia.