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Anna Offit

Anna Offit

Email: [[aoffit]]
Representative Professional Activities and Achievements

Anna Offit writes and teaches about criminal law, evidence, juries, prosecutorial ethics, and empirical legal research. Her current scholarship examines trial strategy and the inclusivity of the criminal jury. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Northwestern Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Washington Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She is also the author of a book, The Imagined Juror: How Hypothetical Juries Influence Federal Prosecutors (NYU Press, 2022). Offit's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Lois Roth Foundation, and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Offit has been the recipient of various awards for her teaching on criminal law, evidence, and criminal jury reform. These include the 2024-2025 Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Award (a university-wide prize), the Don M. Smart Teaching Award (the law school's highest teaching honor) in 2023 and 2025, as well as the 2022 SMU Women in Law Distinguished Professor Award.

Offit received her JD from the Georgetown University Law Center where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics and as a law clerk at the Department of Justice’s Office for Civil Rights. She also holds a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University.

Prior to joining the faculty at W&M, Offit served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s Civil Jury Project. She was also the recipient of a Fulbright grant to study the abolition of Norway’s jury system.


Scholarly Publications
Books
  • The Imagined Juror (New York University Press 2022). Online.
Articles and Book Chapters
  • Striking Jurors with Hardship Excuses, __ forthcoming (2026) in Research Handbook on Jury Decision Making (Edward Elgar Publishing).
  • The Specter of Jury Nullification, UCLA L. Rev. __ (forthcoming).
  • Rethinking Juror Impartiality, 93 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 6 (2025) (invited symposium). SSRN.
  • Reimagining the Inclusive Jury, 57 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 2691 (2024). SSRN.
  • Religious Convictions, 101 N.C. L. Rev. 2 (2023). SSRN.
  • Antidiscrimination Law through a Sociolegal Lens, 73 Ala. L. Rev. 4 (2022) (invited symposium). SSRN.
  • The Character of Jury Exclusion, 106 2173 (2022). SSRN.
  • Benevolent Exclusion, 96 Wash. L. Rev. 613 (2021). SSRN.
  • Playing by the Rule: How ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) Can Regulate Jury Exclusion, 89 Fordham L. Rev. 4 (2021) (invited colloquium). SSRN.
  • Race-Conscious Jury Selection, 82 Ohio St. L. J. 201 (2021). SSRN.
  • With Jurors in Mind: An Ethnographic Study of Prosecutors’ Narratives, 17 SAGE Publications (2021). Online.
  • Dismissing the Jury, in Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts (Cambridge University Press 2021). Online.
  • Giving Life to the Death Penalty, 44 Wiley (2021). Online.
  • Prosecuting in the Shadow of the Jury, 113 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1071 (2019). SSRN.
  • Storied Justice: The Narrative Strategies of US Federal Prosecutors, in The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology (Emerald Publishing Limited 2019).
  • Utfordringer ved komparative juryundersøkelser: Tilfellet Norge, 19 Scandinavian University Press (2019). Online.
  • Injustice Behind Closed Doors: Civil Juries and the #MeToo Movement, 3 Jury Matters 3 (2018).
  • Review: Steven Brill on the History of Arbitration Clauses, 3 Jury Matters 6 (2018).
  • Strengthening the Civil Jury, 31 Cal. Litigation 3 (2018) (with Richard L. Jolly).
  • The Long Shadow of the Civil Jury Trial, 3 Jury Matters 2 (2018).
  • The Jury Is Out: An Ethnographic Study of Lay Participation in the Norwegian Legal System, 41 Wiley (2018). Online.
  • Trial Processes, in The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Wiley 2018). Online.
  • With Jurors in Mind: An Ethnographic Study of Prosecutors' Narratives, Law Culture & Human. (2017). SSRN.
  • Peer Review: Navigating Uncertainty in the United States Jury System, 6 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 169 (2016). SSRN.
  • The Humanities and Public Life by Peter Brooks, Hilary Jewett, 48 Law & Society Rev. 991 (2014) (book review).
  • The Conscience and Culture of Prosecution: An Introduction, 25 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 4 (2012). Online.
  • Ethical Guidance for a Grander Jury, 24 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 761 (2011). Online.

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