Prof. Deborah Denno

Deborah W. Denno is the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law and the Founding Director of Fordham's Neuroscience and Law Center, which provides evidence-based information to academics, lawyers, and the public about legally relevant advances in neuroscience. She teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and torts, and her empirical research on the use of neuroscience evidence in criminal cases — now spanning more than a thousand cases — is the leading body of work in the field. Professor Denno has published widely on criminal law, criminal procedure, the death penalty, lethal injection, and the intersection of science and law, including on insanity, rape law, gender, and biological and genetic explanations of crime. Before joining the Fordham faculty in 1991 she clerked for Judge Anthony J. Scirica of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She holds a Ph.D. in criminology as well as a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and was named one of the fifty most influential women lawyers in America by the National Law Journal.