SelectedWorks of Tamar R Birckhead

• Author Home
• Browse Subjects
• Browse Article Types

Follow

Join My Mailing List

Tamar R Birckhead

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Associate Professor of Law
• Contact Information
• Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Search All Sites

RSS Feed

Print this page

Tamar Birckhead is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill where she teaches the Juvenile Justice Clinic, the Criminal Lawyering
Process, and Juvenile Courts and Delinquency. Her research interests focus on issues
related to juvenile justice policy and reform, criminal law and procedure, and indigent
criminal defense. 

Professor Birckhead's scholarly writing appears in the Buffalo Law Review, North
Carolina Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, and Washington
University Law Review, among other law journals. She also regularly writes commentary,
which has been published in several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, and she
is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and the Juvenile Justice Information
Exchange. In addition, she recently launched a legal blog, Juvenile Justice Blog. She has
presented her work at Harvard Law School, George Washington Law School, Washington &
Lee Law School, Brooklyn Law School, and the Law & Society Association, among other
venues. Professor Birckhead is co-editing the third edition of a casebook, Children,
Parents, and the Law, with Professor Leslie J. Harris. She is also an adjunct professor
at Duke Law School where she teaches a course on juvenile courts and delinquency during
the spring semester. 

Professor Birckhead's article on raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction in
North Carolina has received significant attention at both the state and national levels.
She has published several opinion pieces on the subject of raising the age and has been
interviewed by radio and print reporters across the state on her findings. She has
testified before the N.C. Governor's Crime Commission on the history of raising the
age of juvenile court jurisdiction, and Action for Children North Carolina, the
state's premier child advocacy organization, has issued white papers on her
research. In addition, The Campaign for Youth Justice, a national organization dedicated
to ending the practice of trying, sentencing, and incarcerating youth under 18 in the
adult criminal justice system, highlighted Professor Birckhead's research in their
newsletter and interviewed her for their weekly radio program, Juvenile Justice Matters. 

Prior to joining the UNC School of Law faculty in 2004, Professor Birckhead taught at
Suffolk University Law School in the Suffolk Defenders Program, a year-long criminal
defense clinic. After clerking for the late and the Honorable Edith Fine in the
Massachusetts Appeals Court, she practiced for ten years as a public defender,
representing indigent criminal defendants in the Massachusetts trial and appellate courts
as a staff attorney with the Committee for Public Counsel Services and in federal
district court in Boston as an Assistant Federal Public Defender. Professor Birckhead has
defended clients in a wide variety of criminal cases, from violent felony offenses in
state court to acts of terrorism in federal court. Among her clients was Richard Reid,
the attempted "Shoe Bomber" prosecuted in the First Circuit under the U.S.A.
Patriot Act. 

Licensed to practice in North Carolina, New York and Massachusetts, Professor Birckhead
has been a frequent lecturer at continuing legal education programs across the United
States as well as a faculty member at the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School.
She is a member of both the board and the advisory committee of the Campaign for the Fair
Sentencing of Youth. She is President of the Board for the North Carolina Center on
Actual Innocence and has been appointed to the Executive Council of the Juvenile Justice
and Children's Rights Section of the North Carolina Bar Association. She is also a
member of the Advisory Board for the North Carolina Juvenile Defender as well as a member
of the Criminal Defense Section and the Juvenile Defender Section of the North Carolina
Academy of Trial Lawyers. Professor Birckhead received her B.A. degree in English
Literature with Honors from Yale University and her J.D. with Honors from Harvard Law
School, where she served as Recent Developments Editor of The Harvard Women's Law
Journal. 

Start a Site | FAQ | My Account | Contact Us

SelectedWorks^™ is a trademark of bepress.
Copyright 1999-2013 bepress^™ All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Copyright | Privacy