John D. King James P. Morefield Professor of Law and Director, Criminal Justice Clinic

Phone: 540-458-8518

Email: kingj@wlu.edu

Office: 381 Lewis Hall 

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Area of Expertise

Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Legal Ethics, Experiential Education, Clinical Education

Education

BA, 1992, Brown University

JD, 1996, University of Michigan

LLM, 2005, Georgetown Law Center

About

J.D. King is the James P. Morefield Professor of Law and the Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic. In addition to designing and supervising the Criminal Justice Clinic, J.D. teaches Criminal Procedure and Evidence. His scholarship focuses on indigent criminal defense systems and the right to counsel, as well as criminal defense and prosecution ethics. Before joining W&L in 2008, J.D. was a supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. He has a B.A. in History and Religious Studies from Brown University, a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, and a LL.M. in Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center. 

Prior to teaching, in addition to his work as a public defender, J.D. was a law clerk to United States District Judge Richard H. Kyle in Minnesota, a Prettyman Fellow in Trial Advocacy at Georgetown University Law Center, and a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer in United States District Court for the District of Wyoming. J.D. was a Fulbright Scholar in Chile in 2014, where he taught at the Universidad Viña del Mar and conducted research on the role of the public defender in Chile's criminal justice system.

Selected Publications

Juries, Democracy, and Petty Crime, 24 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law ___ (forthcoming 2022)

Gamesmanship and Criminal Process, 58 American Criminal Law Review 47 (2021)  

The Meaning of a Misdemeanor in a Post-Ferguson World: Evaluating the Reliability of Prior Conviction Evidence, 54 Georgia Law Review 927 (2020)  

Privatizing Criminal Procedure, 107 Georgetown Law Journal 561 (2019)  

Beyond "Life and Liberty:" The Evolving Right to Counsel, 48 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 1 (2013)

- See Prof. King's full list of publications at his Scholarly Commons page.