UW Law Assistant Professor Renagh O'Leary's scholarship on community supervision's sentencing role in state courts was recently honored by the Association of American Law Schools' Criminal Justice Section. 

O'Leary received an honorable mention in the Section’s 2024 Junior Scholars Paper competition. The annual competition recognizes outstanding criminal law scholarship by junior members of the legal academy.  

O'Leary’s paper, "Supervising Sentencing," published in February 2024 by the University of California Davis Law Review, examines the role of community supervision officers and agencies in state court sentencing proceedings. Through analysis of statutes, court rules and internal community supervision agency policy documents, the article provides a descriptive and theoretical account of community supervision’s sentencing role. 

"I’m very honored to have my work recognized by the Criminal Justice Section, and I’m grateful to the Law School for supporting this project," O'Leary said.

This is the second time O'Leary has earned this honor. Her article “Compassionate Release and Decarceration in the States” was honored in the 2022 competition. 

Professor O'Leary joined the UW Law School in 2018. From 2018 to 2023, she taught in the Law School’s Legal Assistance to Incarcerated People clinic. In 2023, she joined the Law School’s tenure-track faculty. Before coming to UW, O'Leary was a trial attorney at the Bronx Defenders, a public defender's office in New York City. 

She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a comments editor for the Yale Law Journal and received the C. LaRue Munson Prize for her clinical work. She received her B.A. in political science, with highest distinction, from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Submitted by Law School News on June 6, 2024

This article appears in the categories: Faculty, Features

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