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Starr, Sonja B.

Assistant Professor of Law

3230 South Hall
734.764.9346
E-mail sbstarr@umich.edu
Sonja B. Starr joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009 and teaches first-year criminal law, international criminal law, and a seminar on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions. Her research interests include prosecutorial conduct, sentencing law and policy, remedies for violations of criminal defendants' rights, and re-entry of ex-offenders. Her research methods include quantitative empirical assessment of the effects of criminal justice policies as well as analysis of legal theory and doctrine. Before coming to Michigan Law, Prof. Starr taught at the University of Maryland School of Law and spent two years at Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law. Prof. Starr has clerked for Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Judge Mohamed Shahabuddeen of the shared Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Between these clerkships, she was an associate with Goldstein & Howe, PC, in Washington, D.C., a firm specializing in U.S. Supreme Court litigation. Prof. Starr earned her JD from Yale Law School, where she served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and was awarded the American Bar Association's annual Ross Student Writing Prize. She received her AB from Harvard, summa cum laude, and is also an alumna of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research Summer Program in Quantitative Methods.

Recent Publications

More Publications...


Co-author. Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice Process: Prosecutors, Judges, and the Effects of United States v. Booker. M. M. Rehavi, co-author. Working Paper, 2012.
Full Text: SSRN | BePress

Co-author. Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and its Sentencing Consequences. M. M. Rehavi, co-author. Univ. of Michigan Law & Economics, Empirical Legal Studies Center Working Paper Series, no. 12-002. Working Paper.
Full Text: SSRN

Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases. Univ. of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper Series, No. 12-018. Working Paper, 2012.
Full Text: SSRN | BePress

"The Right to an Effective Remedy: Balancing Realism and Aspiration." In International Human Rights Law: Six Decades after the UDHR and Beyond, edited by M. A. Baderin and M. Ssenyonjo, 477-98. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.

"Sentence Reduction as a Remedy for Prosecutorial Misconduct." Geo. L. J. 97, no. 6 (2009): 1509-66.
Full Text: HEIN (UMich users) | HEIN | Lexis | Westlaw

"Ensuring Defense Counsel Competence at International Criminal Tribunals." UCLA J. Int'l L. Foreign Aff. 14, no. 1 (2009): 169-206.
Full Text: HEIN (UMich users) | HEIN | Lexis | Westlaw
Professor

Activities

Speaker, "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and its Sentencing Consequences," American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting, May 2012.

Panelist, "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging," American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, November 2011.

Speaker, "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging," Duke Legal Theory Colloquium, November 2011.

Discussant and panel chair, Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, November 2011

Participant, Junior International Law Scholars Roundtable, UC-Hastings, February 2010.

Discussant, "The Changing Status of Human Rights Law Before International Criminal Tribunals" by Frederic Megret, Vanderbilt University Law School International Law Roundtable, February 12, 2010.

Participant in the Netter Conference on Race, Criminal Records and Employment Law, Cornell Law School, October 2009.

 
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