Degrees
Expertise
- Criminal Law
- Criminal Procedure
Professor JaneAnne Murray joined the Law School in August 2011, and founded the School’s clemency project in 2014. The Project became an official clinic of the School in 2022. Murray specializes in issues relating to criminal law, sentencing and incarceration. She teaches evidence, criminal procedure and the School’s undergraduate class, LAW 3000.
Murray received her B.C.L. degree from University College Cork in 1989 and her LL.M. degree from the University of Cambridge in 1990, 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.
She has defended individuals in many high-profile cases and investigations, including executives and directors at Tyco, A.I.G., and Lehman Brothers and individuals facing terrorism charges, and has been lead counsel in more than 25 jury trials.
In 2014, she 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. Her founding of the School’s clemency project complemented that role, and over the next two years, she supervised 15 students who drafted 35 petitions for eligible inmates. Fourteen of these inmates received grants of clemency. Since then, the Clemency Project has secured the release of an additional 36 individuals using various clemency/second-look mechanisms.
A frequent guest lecturer at CLE programs, she serves on several boards and committees, including the board of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (from 2018 to 2025) for which she co-chairs its sentencing committee and its second look taskforce, a member of the ABA taskforce to reform the federal economic fraud sentencing guideline, and a member of the advisory board to the Irish American Bar Association of New York (IABANY). She writes regularly on sentencing issues. Murray created and organizes IABANY’s annual Bloomsday Celebration, which showcases Ulysses and James Joyce's contribution to the First Amendment.
Murray won the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year Award in 2015 and 2024.
