Effective August 1, 2022, Renée McDonald Hutchins began her tenure as dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.
Hutchins returns to Maryland Carey Law after a three-year deanship at the David A. Clarke School of Law (UDC) in Washington D.C. Previously, she spent 14 years on the Maryland Carey Law faculty and was the Jacob A. France Professor of Public Interest Law and co-director of the Clinical Law Program.
“I love this school,” says Hutchins. “I am excited to see the good work we can do and what more we can build.”
Hutchins originally came to Maryland Carey Law in 2004, founding and teaching the Appellate and Post-Conviction Advocacy Clinic, as well as traditional doctrinal courses and advanced seminars. In 2014, she rose to the position of co-director of the Clinical Law Program.
She is a leading expert on the Fourth Amendment and criminal appellate practice. Her legal scholarship, which sits at the intersection of criminal procedure and social science, has been published in leading law journals and cited by numerous U.S. Courts of Appeals and state appellate courts. She authored the textbook Developing Professional Skills: Criminal Procedure and is co-author of the textbooks Learning Criminal Procedure and Essential Lawyering Skills. She also has written about racial profiling and the practice of stop-and-frisk, and has provided legal analysis and insight for media outlets such as MSNBC, Voice of America, and C-SPAN.
In 2017, Hutchins was elected to the prestigious American Law Institute. Her extensive legal experience spans federal and state courts across the nation, including the high courts of New York and Maryland where she served three four-year terms on the Appellate Courts Judicial Nominating Commission. Currently, she is serving on the board of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. She also taught in NYU’s groundbreaking Lawyering Program, which is influencing legal writing curricula nationally.
Hutchins earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spelman College, America’s oldest historically Black liberal arts college for women. She went on to receive her JD from Yale Law School, where she was chair of the Moot Court Board of Directors, and then clerked for late Nathaniel R. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.