Criminal Law Expert Anna Offit Joins William & Mary Law Faculty
William & Mary Law School is pleased to announce that Anna Offit joins the faculty this summer.
Offit is a nationally recognized scholar and award‑winning teacher whose scholarly interests span criminal law, evidence, juries, prosecutorial ethics, and empirical legal research.
“Our students and scholarly community will greatly benefit from welcoming a colleague whose expertise bridges doctrinal analysis and empirical inquiry across a number of specialties,” said A. Benjamin Spencer, Dean and Trustee Professor. “Professor Offit’s presence strengthens our commitment to thoughtful, impactful legal education.”
Offit’s current scholarship explores trial strategy, Supreme Court jury jurisprudence, and the inclusivity of the criminal jury, with articles published or forthcoming in leading journals including the Northwestern Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Washington Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Offit is also the author of The Imagined Juror: How Hypothetical Juries Influence Federal Prosecutors (NYU Press, 2022). The book, based on extensive field research, examines the counterintuitive importance of jurors in federal prosecutors’ work at a moment when jury trials are statistically in decline.
Richard Ashby Wilson, Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Human Rights Initiative at Princeton University, praised The Imagined Juror as “a fabulous ethnography of the US criminal justice system at a time when there is more impetus than at any point in the past 40 years to dismantle the whole edifice of mass incarceration.”
Offit’s innovative empirical research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation, the Lois Roth Foundation, and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Before coming to William & Mary, Offit taught at Southern Methodist University, where she earned several teaching awards, including the university‑wide Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Award (2024-25) and the law school’s highest honor for the best classroom instructor (voted by the 3L class), the Don M. Smart Teaching Award (in 2023 and 2025). Offit also received the SMU Women in Law Distinguished Professor Award (2022).
Offit earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as Editor‑in‑Chief of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. She also holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University and M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Earlier in her career, Offit was a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU Law School’s Civil Jury Project and a Fulbright scholar studying the abolition of Norway’s jury system.
At William & Mary, Offit will teach Evidence, Criminal Procedure, and a seminar on juries. She is thrilled to join one of the country’s leading law faculties and looks forward to leveraging her expertise to help train the next generation of Citizen Lawyers.
“There is no other place like William & Mary in the contemporary legal academic landscape,” Offit says. “To be part of a public university with a community of brilliant, civically-minded scholars and students is a dream come true.”
Outside the classroom, Offit will no doubt be found hiking and biking around the peninsula and perusing local bakeries and farmers markets. A born and bred New Yorker, she has twice moved to Norway for comparative research on the jury, adventures in the Arctic, and—she must admit—the world’s best cinnamon buns.