Prof. Deborah Tuerkheimer

Deborah Tuerkheimer is the Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where she teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. She joined the Northwestern faculty in 2014 after teaching at DePaul University College of Law from 2009 to 2014, where she was also Associate Dean for Faculty Development, and at the University of Maine School of Law from 2002 to 2009. After clerking for Justice Jay Rabinowitz of the Alaska Supreme Court, she served for five years as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney's Office, where she specialized in the prosecution of domestic violence, child abuse, and sex crimes. She is the author of CREDIBLE: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers (2021; paperback 2026) and Flawed Convictions: “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and the Inertia of Injustice (Oxford University Press, 2014), and a co-author of the casebooks Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials and An Analytical Approach to Evidence (8th ed. 2026). She has written numerous articles on sexual violence and domestic violence, most recently “Survivors’ Justice” in the Virginia Law Review (2026) and “Victim, Reconstructed: Sex Crimes Experts and the New Rape Paradigm” in the University of Illinois Law Review (2024). An elected member of the American Law Institute since 2015, she served as an Adviser on its Principles of the Law, Student Sexual Misconduct: Procedural Frameworks for Colleges and Universities and as a member of the consultative group for its revision of the Model Penal Code’s sexual assault provisions. She holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.