Penn State
Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA
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Criminal Law Faculty

  • Gopal Balachandran

    Professor Balachandran directs the Externships Program as well as the Criminal Appellate & Post-Conviction Services Clinic. In his role as the Director of the Externships Program, he oversees students’ employment with legal services and governmental organizations, including externships with judges. Students in the program have worked in diverse placements from clerking for a federal magistrate judge in San Diego to working as an associate at a large law firm in Paris.

  • Katrice Bridges Copeland

    Professor Copeland focuses her scholarship on white collar crime and health care fraud and abuse. Prior to joining Penn State she clerked for Judge David H. Coar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C. Her practice focused on white collar criminal defense and constitutional litigation. As part of her white collar crime practice, she represented pharmaceutical companies in health care fraud and abuse prosecutions.

  • Beth Farmer

    Professor Beth Farmer’s research interests include U.S. and foreign antitrust and trade regulation law, issues of federalism, and comparative competition policy. She has served as a non-governmental advisor and rapporteur for the International Competition Network annual conferences in 2010 (Istanbul) and 2009 (Zurich) and is currently working with the Agency Effectiveness Working Group on a chapter for the Competition Agency Practices Manual that will address agency prioritization and strategic planning, project management techniques and project evaluation.

  • Kit Kinports

    Professor Kinports is a leading scholar of feminist jurisprudence, criminal law and federalism, and an award-winning classroom teacher. Professor Kinports is a former clerk for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before entering the teaching profession, she practiced law with Ennis, Friedman, Bersoff & Ewing in Washington, D.C. for several years.

  • Associate Dean for Research and Partnerships and Professor of Law Dara E. Purvis is a scholar of family law, feminist legal theory, masculinities, and sexuality, gender identity, and the law. Her work examines gendered impacts of the law and proposes neutralizing reforms, most recently in the context of how the law defines parenthood. She has been published in, among others, the California Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Florida State Law Review, Michigan State Law Review, Case Western Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Cambridge University Press, and The New York Times.

  • Victor C. Romero

    Victor Romero is the interim dean at Penn State Law and the School of International Affairs. Dean Romero’s research emphasizes the law's impact on marginalized groups. He is especially interested in borders and boundaries—both legal and cultural—and how these function. He has written on immigration policy and individual rights and analyzed Supreme Court and other federal court opinions through the lens of post-Brown v. Board of Education notions of equality and discrimination. His inquiries also intersect other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including history, social psychology, critical race theory, cultural studies (e.g., constructing Filipinx identity), Christianity, and criminal justice.

  • Jacob Schuman

    Jacob Schuman is an assistant professor at Penn State Law and an affiliate faculty member at Penn State's Criminal Justice Research Center and Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse. He studies criminal law, criminal procedure, and sentencing.

  • Richard Settgast

    Professor Richard Settgast joined Penn State Law after serving for seven years as an assistant public defender for Centre County, where he maintained a perfect jury trial record. He also served on the planning committee for the Centre County Drug Court, where he was tasked with ensuring the proposed treatment court program did not violate any of the constitutional rights of its participants.  

  • Professor Wadhia is the Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and Clinical Professor of Law at Penn State Law in University Park. Her research focuses on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and the intersections of race, national security, and immigration. She has published more than thirty law reviews articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration law, as well as two books. She is also the founding director of the Penn State Law Center for Immigrants' Rights Clinic.

  • Sam Wiseman

    Professor Sam Wiseman is a Professor of Law. He teaches and writes in the areas of Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, and Food Law, and he has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, George Washington Law Review, and Boston College Law Review, among other journals. He also served as a law clerk to Judge Fortunato Benavides of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson of the Supreme Court of Texas, and he was a Fellow in the Texas Solicitor General's Office. Professor Wiseman received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.