Education
- B.A., Sociology, Willamette University
- J.D., Law, Georgetown University Law Center
- LL.M., Advocacy, Georgetown University Law Center
Research Interests
- Access to Justice
- State and Civil Courts and Judges
- Legal Education and Clinical Pedagogy
- Legal Regulatory Reform
About
Anna E. Carpenter became the 14th Dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Law and 9th Director of the OU Law Center on July 15, 2024. She also holds the Fenelon Boesche Chair in Law.
Carpenter joined OU from the University of Utah, where she served as Special Advisor to the President. In this role, she was responsible for leading innovative university projects such as launching a first-in-the-nation program that leverages pay-for-success financing to scale social interventions developed by university researchers, as well as developing a new program to increase college affordability and community service by blending service requirements with substantial scholarships and wages for undergraduate students.
At the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, she was Professor of Law and, while serving as Director of Clinical Programs, she founded and directed Justice Lab, a clinical course in which students work with community organizations to solve legal and policy problems and advocate for systemic change. For her leadership in legal services and legal education innovation, she received the inaugural Alli Gerkman Legal Visionary Award from the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.
Carpenter’s scholarship includes empirical and theoretical work on state civil courts and judges, access to justice, the relationship between law, civil courts, structural inequality, legal regulatory innovation, and legal paraprofessionals. She has also written on legal education and clinical pedagogy, and her papers have been selected for the Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop and the New Voices in Civil Justice Workshop. Her scholarship has been recognized with numerous national honors, including the Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award, and she was named a Bellow Scholar by the Association of American Law Schools’ Committee on Lawyering in the Public Interest.
Prior to joining the University of Utah faculty in 2019, Carpenter’s academic appointments included Associate Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law and Clinical Teaching Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. She was also a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow.
Before her academic career, she worked as a legal services lawyer representing low-income people in civil and immigration matters and as a federal policy analyst focused on domestic violence and poverty. She has a J.D. and LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Willamette University.
Additional Information
Lawyerless Law Development, 75 Stan. L. Rev. Online 64 (2023) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, and Alyx Mark).
The Democratic (Il)Legitimacy of Assembly-Line Litigation, 135 Harv. L. Rev. Forum 358 (2022) (with Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan, and Alyx Mark).
The Field of State Civil Courts, 122 Colum. L. Rev. 1165 (2022) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, and Alyx Mark).
The Institutional Mismatch of State Civil Courts, 122 Colum. L. Rev. 1471 (2022) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, and Alyx Mark).
Judges in Lawyerless Courts, 110 Geo. L.J. 509 (2022) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, and Jessica K. Steinberg).
Judges and the Deregulation of the Lawyer’s Monopoly, 89 Fordham L. Rev. 1 (2021) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, and Jessica K. Steinberg).
COVID, Crisis, and Courts, 99 Texas L. Rev. Online 10 (2020) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, and Jessica K. Steinberg).
Developing “NextGen” Lawyers through Project-Based Learning, in Modernising Legal Education (Catrina Denvir, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Simplified Courts Can’t Solve Inequality, 148 Daedalus, J. Am. Acad. Arts & Sci. 128 (2019) (with Colleen F. Shanahan).
Studying the “New” Civil Judges, 2018 Wisc. L. Rev. 249 (2018) (with Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan, and Alyx Mark).
Active Judging and Access to Justice, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 647 (2017).
Measuring Law School Clinics, 92 Tulane L. Rev. 547 (2018) (with Colleen F. Shanahan, Jeffrey Selbin, and Alyx Mark).
Trial and Error: Lawyers and Nonlawyer Advocates, 42 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1023 (2017) (peer-reviewed) (with Colleen F. Shanahan and Alyx Mark).
Can a Little Representation Be a Dangerous Thing? 67 Hastings L. J. 1387 (2016) (with Colleen F. Shanahan and Alyx Mark).
Lawyers, Power, and Strategic Expertise, 93 Denver L. Rev. 469 (2016) (with Colleen F. Shanahan and Alyx Mark).
The Project Model of Clinical Education: Eight Pedagogical Principles to Maximize Student Learning and Social Justice Impact, 20 Clinical L. Rev. 39 (2013) (peer-reviewed).
Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award, Association of American Law Schools, 2023
Alli Gerkman Legal Visionary Award, Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, 2021
American Constitution Society Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop Selected Paper: Active Judging and Access to Justice, 2017
New Voices in Civil Justice Workshop, Selected Paper: Lawyers, Powers, and Strategic Expertise, 2015
Bellow Scholar, Association of American Law Schools, 2013-2015
Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow, Georgetown University Law Center, 2011-2013