Michael Pinard is the Co-Director of the Clinical Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. He currently teaches the Youth, Education, and Justice Clinic. He has taught the Reentry Clinic; Law and Social Change; Policing, Communities, and the Law; the Permanence of Criminal Records; Freddie Gray’s Baltimore: Past, Present and Moving Forward (with colleagues); Criminal Procedure; Criminal Procedure II; Legal Profession; the Criminal Defense Clinic; and Comparative Criminal Process (Aberdeen, Scotland). Professor Pinard has published law review articles and op-eds on the criminal process, criminal defense lawyering, race and the criminal legal system, policing, and the interconnections between the reentry of individuals with criminal records and the myriad consequences of convictions.
Professor Pinard has worked to improve the criminal legal system nationally and locally through legislative and policy advocacy, writing and participation in various working groups and advisory groups. He has also been active nationally in efforts to improve legal education. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Clinical Law Review and the Immediate Past Chair of the AALS Section on Civil Rights. He is a former president of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) and served on behalf of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education as co-chair of the Clinical Scholarship Committee and chair of the Nomination’s Committee. He has served on the Clinical Skills Committee of the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar He is a former co-chair of the AALS Section on Litigation.
Professor Pinard currently serves on the board of directors of the Gault Center, the leadership council of the Public Justice Center, and the Maryland Access to Justice Commission. He has served as a board member of the Public Justice Center, an advisory committee member of the Maryland Reentry Partnership and the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and as chair of the Maryland State Bar Association’s Legal Education and Bar Admission’s Committee.
In 2011, Professor Pinard was honored as a Champion of Change by the White House for his work on behalf of individuals with criminal records. In 2008, he received the Shanara Gilbert Award from the Clinical Section of the Association of American Law School as an emerging clinical law professor committed to teaching and achieving social justice.
Professor Pinard received his juris doctor from the New York University School of Law. He was a staff attorney with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City. From 1998 to 2000, he was a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to coming to Maryland in 2002, he was an Assistant Professor at St. John's University Law School and a Visiting Associate Professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law. In spring 2015, he was a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School.