Professor Michael Serota - Faculty Director

Michael Serota is an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School, Director of the Criminal Justice Reform Lab, and a Senior Research Scholar with the Academy for Justice. Professor Serota teaches and writes about criminal law and public policy.  His research blends doctrinal legal analysis with insights drawn from philosophy, psychology, criminology, and his years of criminal justice reform work. 

Professor Serota is the author of more than 30 articles, essays, and opinion pieces.  His writing can be found in print journals such as the New York University Law Review, California Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review, the online publications of the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and news outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.  Professor Serota's research has been translated into two languages and cited hundreds of times, including by state and federal courts, casebooks, and legal treatises.

A nationally recognized mens rea scholar, Professor Serota specializes in multidisciplinary projects that bring together criminal justice experts from across academia and the policy world.  Current projects include:

• Conducting the first ever empirical analysis of an individual mens rea reform in collaboration with social scientists at the RAND Corporation and Arnold Ventures;

• Conducting a systematic content analysis of fifteen years of legislative debate over criminal law reform in multiple jurisdictions in collaboration with criminologists at Arizona State University and a legal director at the ACLU;

• Conducting the nation’s largest survey on public attitudes about mens rea and the influence of culpable mental states on criminal responsibility judgments in collaboration with a philosopher and a criminologist at the University of Surrey. 

Professor Serota also advises state governments, policy organizations, and media outlets on criminal justice reform, building on his significant policy experience.  Prior to joining academia, Professor Serota served as the chief legislative counsel for the only ground-up criminal code reform project to take place in the United States since the 1980s.  Professor Serota also worked for three federal judges, and taught introductory courses on criminal justice to incarcerated and at-risk youth through Georgetown Law’s D.C. Street Law Clinic and Berkeley Law’s Advocates for Youth Justice Program.